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…
Category: Performances
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…
PROM 7: Orliński serves up a tasty late-night supper of little-known Italian delicacies
For the first late night Prom of the 2024 season, Jakub Józef Orliński gave this intimate recital of 17th century Italian vocal and operatic music, which would have been sung…
PROM 6: A striking Verdi Requiem of blazing force and compelling drama
With this performance, the first given at the Proms since 2021, and twenty-second since its first outing in 1956, Verdi’s Requiem is now the most frequently performed non-operatic work I…
A cheerful and entertaining performance of Verdi’s late comedy amidst the sylvan magic of West Green
The opera at West Green is back in the ‘green theatre’, rather than open air on the lake, but opened up at the back so that the house itself forms…
Pelléas et Mélisande at Munich
Nine years ago, in this same theatre at this same festival, I saw Munich’s previous Pelléas et Mélisande: a staging by Christiane Pohle which I greatly admired, but everyone else…
Unalloyed delight: Handel’s Acis and Galatea at Holland Park
This seems to be quite the year for Opera Holland Park: A revelatory Puccini Edgar, a powerful coupling of Wolf-Ferrari (Il segreto di Susanna) and Leoncavallo (Pagliacci), and now the…