‘A monument to this most beautiful of all dreams’ is how Wagner described the intoxicating contemplation of love that is his Tristan und Isolde, and it is essentially as a…
Category: Performances
PROM 19: Marking 150 years since Holst’s birth, The Cloud Messenger receives its Proms premiere
With an all-British programme bookended by Eastern influences, variously Buddhist and Sanskrit, this was one of those concerts that looked interesting on paper. The curiosity quota was high, but the…
Bodacious Bordeaux: Santa Fe Elixir
Santa Fe Opera’s piquant, frolicsome version of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love) is currently regaling audiences with a revival of its popular 2009 staging. Director Stephen Lawless and…
An Unusual Bel Canto Revival in New York: Carolina Uccelli, Anna di Resburgo (1835)
With New York’s Metropolitan Opera struggling to hype star singers, commission enduring new works, fill a mammoth space, and balance its budget, the vitality of the city’s opera scene has…
Santa Fe Righteous, Roiling and Rueful
A new operatic work with an original story is a joy to anticipate, and Santa Fe Opera’s World Premiere of The Righteous is to be applauded for its bountiful creativity…
A Barber of Seville that combines Italian and Spanish elements in the quintessentially English gardens at West Green
The theatre at West Green already has the house as the background beyond the lawn at its open back. Victoria Newlyn’s production of The Barber of Seville, therefore, simply reduces…
Under the Greenwood Tree: an impressive operatic debut from Paul Carr and Dorset Opera
How we respond to Paul Carr’s operatic makeover of Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree will depend on how much we consider the author’s 1872 publication to be an examination…
PROM 9: Alice Coote sings Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder
This was a riveting concert. Brahms (in his most enigmatic of symphonies), Schoenberg (in one of his lushest of scores) and Mahler in one of his most profound of song…
Il ritorno d’Ulisse at the Aix Festival
Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Aix Festival, completed the Aix Festival’s Monteverdi cycle just now by staging, himself, this Il ritorno d’Ulisse (1640). L’Orfeo (1607) was staged by…
High infidelity – a double bill of comedy and tragedy at Opera Holland Park
‘Cav and Pag get a divorce’ is Opera Holland Park’s promotional line for its double bill, which prefaces Leoncavallo’s familiar Pagliacci with a relatively rarely seen work, Wolf-Ferrari’s Il segreto…