Handel’s Arianna:  An unforgettable close to the London Handel Festival’s ‘Spring Awakenings’ festival

This is not the London Handel Festival’s first stab at Handel’s unjustly neglected opera, Arianna in Creta; it was previously staged at the Royal College of Music in March 2014.…

Verdi, La traviata in Venice

The opening reception of the Biennale had ended early, Teatro La Fenice was dark, and I found myself with an unexpectedly free evening in Venice. Musica a Palazzo is one…

Florencia en el Amazonas in San Jose

Daniel Catán’s Florencia en el Amazonas is having a moment. And just now at Silicon Valley’s Opera San Jose it was a quite wonderful moment — well cast, smart production…

“Birds and Balls” in San Francisco

Two recent one-acts cleverly combined by stage director Brian Staufenbiel into one grand, operatic sporting event. San Francisco’s alternative opera company, Opera Parallele pulled off a slam dunk show. It…

Some outstanding singing at the Royal Opera’s new Carmen

For any new staging of a work as familiar as Carmen there is an imperative to root out fresh perspectives, to pursue a previously unexplored angle; effectively to reinvent the…

Bach’s Easter Music from the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment

If Holy week is usually a time for Christian meditation, this concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall given by the Choir and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment traded solemn…

A Mesmerising Death in Venice from Welsh National Opera

Like the protagonist in Thomas Mann’s eponymous novella, Benjamin Britten’s failing health made him keenly aware of his own mortality as he embarked upon one of the most challenging projects…

Welsh National Opera’s Così fan tutte

Dismissed by Beethoven and Wagner, Così fan tutte has taken nearly two centuries to emerge from society’s censor and for Mozart’s genius for expressing human nature through sublime music to…

McVicar’s Tristan und Isolde returns to the New National Theatre Tokyo

David McVicar’s production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, making a welcome return to the New National Theatre, Tokyo, was seen on March 20. The revival, the first since its widely…

Simon Boccanegra and The Exterminating Angel in Paris

Both operas staged by famed (for many) or infamous (for others) Spanish stage director Calixto Bieito.  Both Parisian Bieito productions bore this stage director’s signature touches — a complex, abstract…