Pagliacci: The Grange Festival

If theatre in general, and verismo opera in particular, is based on the tension between pretence and reality, art and life, this performance of Pagliacci at The Grange in leafy…

Roderick Williams joins Sir Mark Elder and the Hallé

Roderick Williams has had a busy pandemic.  The last couple of weeks alone have seen the baritone joining with VOCES8 for a concert in their Live from London – Christmas…

Pauline Viardot’s Cinderella: a Christmas treat from Northern Opera Group

Pauline Viardot was the scion of a distinguished vocal dynasty. Her father, Manuel Garcia (tenor, impresario, teacher) took part in the premieres of Rossini’s Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra and Il barbiere…

Owen Wingrave: Grange Park Opera

In 1954, the year in which he completed The Turn of the Screw, Britten wrote to Eric Walter White that he had just read another short story by Henry James…

Schubert in the spotlight: Roderick Williams and ‘Momentum’ artists perform Schwanengesang

Led by Artistic Director Anthony Friend, Bandstand Chamber Festival, which presented a memorable series of concerts in the bandstand at Battersea Park this Summer, has returned with a Winter series.…

Solstice: VOCES8 & The Aeolians

The candles were in place; the rose blush lighting spread a warm glow in St Anne and St Agnes Church; mezzo-soprano Katie Jeffries-Harris was back from ‘self-isolation’; and, the semi-circle…

A Guardian Angel: VOCES8 open their Live from London – Christmas festival

Sixteen concerts over five weeks, 280 artists, a ‘Young Singers’ spotlight featuring singers from the UK, US Germany and Singapore, and six newly commissioned works.  VOCES8’s Live from London –…

Separation and Reconciliation: Opera Scenes presented by the Royal College of Music Opera Studio

‘Separation and reconciliation’: a fitting way to sum up the experience of many of us during the past months.  And, also, the theme which united the Opera Scenes – drawn…

Rusalka at the Teatro Real in Madrid

For all the popularity of what might be termed its hit number, Dvořák’s opera Rusalka has a somewhat odd history in the UK.  It had to wait until 1959 before…

La Bohème at a Drive-in Movie Theater

Well, maybe it wasn’t an opera house, but it was somewhere to go for opera beyond your living room. It was festive indeed to join a few hundred diehard aficionados…