Soprano Nina Stemme, tenor Stuart Skelton, bass Franz-Josef Selig and conductor Simon Rattle create a Tristan of transcendent music in a revelatory staging by Simon Stone. The London Symphony Orchestra…
Falstaff at the Aix Festival
It was inevitable. If stage director Barrie Kosky famously ravaged Wagner’s only comedy at Bayreuth, then he must do the same to Verdi’s only comedy. It happened just now in…
Dramatic darkness and vocal delights as Kasper Holten’s Don Giovanni returns to the Royal Opera House
So, after a Così that was wonderfully serene but somewhat serioso, now a Don Giovanni that impresses vocally but seems to have lost some of its giocoso. Kasper Holten’s production…
VOCES8 open Live for London Summer with a sprinkle of stardust
VOCES8’s new Live from London summer festival opened in ‘sparkling’ fashion with a characteristically mixed repertoire programme, entitled Stardust. Much was reassuringly familiar, and very welcome: the perfect blending and…
Glyndebourne’s Così fan tutte provides welcome reassurance and orderliness
When I last saw Nicholas Hytner’s 2006 Glyndebourne production of Così fan tutte – at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury during the 2017 autumn tour, at the time reportedly the…
Musically, a first-rate Midsummer Night’s Dream from The Grange Festival
Thank goodness for modern technology and sophisticated recording techniques, without which this production of Pears’s and Britten’s cherry-picked edit of Shakespeare’s play might have been scuppered. A month before curtain-up…
Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the Grange Festival
Stephen Lawless’ production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut opened at the Grange Festival on 26 June 2021, the third of this year’s three opera productions all originally planned for 2020. Elin Pritchard was…
Mixed performances in a recent St Matthew Passion from Accentus
Claims to create ‘a new and fresh perspective’ in the pre-release publicity for this St Matthew Passion are bold. We are led to expect ‘raging choirs, intimate chorales and emotionally…
Handel’s London Altos: Iestyn Davies at Kings Place
At Kings Place it’s currently half-portions and double-helpings: to ‘get round’ the 50% capacity restrictions, the answer is simply to perform the concert twice – and Iestyn Davies and the…
Rewarding performances from Philippe Herreweghe in three of J.S. Bach’s choral works
Every freshly minted disc from Philippe Herreweghe’s Collegium Vocale Gent prompts a rapturous fanfare. We take for granted the quality of each recording venture from this 74-year-old Belgian, but how…