Not many concert venues double up as school assembly halls. Actually, that statement does a double disservice: first, to Saffron Hall, which opened on the site of Saffron Walden County…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
Anthony Roth Costanzo makes his debut at Wigmore Hall with La Nuova Musica
On the page this looked rather a rag-bag sort of programme. Some early Mozart opera seria arias and songs, alongside two of Gluck’s best-known arias from Orfeo ed Euridice, welded…
Perfection, of a Kind: Britten vs. Auden – City of London Sinfonia at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
‘I’ve seen & am seeing Auden a lot, & our immediate future is locked with his, it seems.’ So wrote Benjamin Britten to his sister, Barbara, on 3 September 1939.[1]…
Gallery of Memories: Mary Bevan & Anna Tilbrook at the Oxford International Song Festival
There was a veritable feast of new music at this year’s Oxford International Song Festival, much of it commissioned by the Festival itself. Gallery of Memories, a song cycle by…
The Glass Eye: an important and impressive new song cycle at the Oxford International Song Festival
Introducing Alex Ho’s new song cycle, The Glass Eye, before this evening recital at the Oxford International Song Festival, Artistic Director Sholto Kynoch noted that this was the most substantial…
Filiations – Les compositrices de la Conservatoire de Paris: Oxford International Song Festival
In a review in Le Temps in 1937, Florent Schmitt commented, ‘It was, if I may say, the great feminine week: at the Concerts Lamoureux the Concerto of Mlle Jeanne…
Life Victoria: Oxford International Song Festival
Two events on day thirteen of the Festival, in partnership with LIFE Victoria in Barcelona, marked the centenary of the great Spanish soprano Victoria de los Angeles, a celebration that…
Un ballo in maschera: Chelsea Opera Group at Cadogan Hall
The title of Un ballo in maschera may suggest elegance and courtly high jinx, but Verdi’s opera, with its vengeful assassins, Beelzebub-conjuring sorceress and murderous drawing of lots is a…
The Pre-Raphaelite Poets: Oxford International Song Festival
Continuing this year’s theme of the relationship between the musical, poetic and visual arts, this Oxford International Song Festival lunchtime recital purported to reflect the topics which ‘fixated the artists…
The Colour Revolution: Oxford International Song Festival
The Ashmolean Museum’s current special exhibition, Colour Revolution: Victorian art, fashion & design, aims to dispel the notion of the Victorian era as a bleak, black-and-white industrial age by revealing…