On Sunday, 25 August Lyric Opera of Chicago presented its annual Sunday in the Park with Lyric at Millennium Park. In addition to welcoming a new season, Lyric Opera also…
Category: Recitals/Concerts
PROM 52: Carmen and the cigarette girls come to town
There’s a long tradition of bringing productions from Glyndebourne to the BBC Proms in London. It’s one way of making them more widely accessible. The original production of Bizet’s Carmen…
PROM 50: A curate’s egg of an evening but a magnificent Glagolitic Mass
For the second of two consecutive appearances at the Albert Hall, Jakub Hrůša and his Prague-based orchestra delivered an all-Czech programme showcasing a Proms premiere, a seldom-heard piano concerto and…
PROM 37: Pappano’s operatic War Requiem resonates with poetry and horror
Composers have long taken the horrors of the Second World War and used it as either a lament for its atrocities or an expression of reconciliation after them. Both Krzysztof…
PROM 27: Towards the celestial region in Saariaho, Mozart and Richard Strauss
Religion has much to answer for, not least in the range of musical inspiration it has delivered over the ages. In the 1960s people were drawn to southern Mexico to…
PROM 23: Bravura performance of Busoni’s Piano Concerto from Benjamin Grosvenor
Those new to Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto might have wondered about his quasi-symphonic concept, a work of Mahlerian proportions that Benjamin Grosvenor considers to be a “kind of operatic symphony,…
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…
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…
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…