Some years ago British stage director Katie Mitchell, with French early music conductor Raphaël Pichon concocted a dramatic action based on fragments of cantatas by J.S. Bach for the Aix Festival. Here it was again, in Lyon’s historic, spoken word Théâtre des Célestins (above photo).
Category: Performances
The Royal Academy of Music celebrates 200 years with a triple bill and a new opera
Commissioning a new opera for its 200th anniversary, and then staging and performing it with such excellence, are laudable things for the Royal Academy of Music to have done. If…
St John Passion: devotion and drama from Mark Padmore and the OAE
J.S. Bach’s two settings of the Passion of Christ are soaring manifestations of early modern Lutheran devotion, profound meditations on suffering (from the Latin verb, patior, meaning ‘to suffer, bear…
A Quiet Place at the Palais Garnier
A Quiet Place has come of age, thirty-nine years later. In 1983 much of its subject matter was sensitive, even taboo. As well it dwelt on naked emotional histories that…
“Family Secrets”* in Lyon (Irrelohe)
Irrelohe. An orchestral orgy — triple winds, quadruple brass though six horns, two harps, organ, celeste, guitar, mandolins, an eighth player percussion battery plus tympani and strings. Libretto and music…
“Family Secrets”* at the Opéra de Lyon (Rigoletto)
Rigoletto. Docudrama of a father whose wife dies in childbirth, raises daughter who falls in love with a selfish, debauched hoodlum. Show curtain is block apartment lighted windows. And they…
Louise Alder and Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall
Louise Alder’s lunchtime recital at Wigmore Hall, with pianist Joseph Middleton, was almost operatic in its scope and emotional energy. And, Alder showed her fearlessness by opening her programme with…
Ariadne auf Naxos at the Met
A funny thing happened at the Metropolitan Opera last Thursday, during the final performance of a recent run of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In the silence after the applause…
Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera House
“What harbour shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms?” The opening moments of Deborah Warner’s new production of Britten’s Peter Grimes at the Royal Opera House make it…
Werther in Marseille
The Opéra de Marseille assembled a fine cast to perform the Massenet masterpiece in a prize winning production from Nancy. Bordeaux tenor Thomas Bettinger poured his heart out as the…