The extravagantly carved Marble Hall at Hatfield House, which is named after its black-and-white chequered floor, remains much as it was when Robert Cecil, the 1st Earl of Salisbury, built…
Ruby Hughes and friends at the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival
The theme of this year’s Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival is ‘A Family Affair’. As Lord Salisbury and Artistic Director Guy Johnston explain in their introductions in the Festival programme,…
Medtner in England: a marvellous new release from SOMM
Composer-pianist Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) has sometimes been labelled, like his compatriot and friend Sergei Rachmaninov, as being ‘born too late’. The late-Romantic idiom in which they both wrote, well into…
Glowing Wagner and Mahler’s Fourth from Vladimir Jurowski and the Bayerisches Staatsorchester
I first heard the Bayerisches Staatsorchester in the early 1980s – and one’s earliest memories, of ones first orchestras, often remain long over time. Wolfgang Sawallisch – never a favourite…
The English Tenor: a debut disc from Scott Robert Shaw
The English Tenor might seem a rather odd title for a disc which is sung by a tenor who was born in Australia, trained at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music…
Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore at the Royal Opera House
Now in its fifth revival, the popularity of Laurent Pelly’s L’elisir d’amore remains unchanged, his nicely observed 1950s rural Italy still pulling in the punters. It’s not just the arresting…
George Benjamin’s Picture a day like this at the Linbury Theatre
In George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Picture a Day like this,a Woman sets out on a quest to find a person who is genuinely happy. Having experienced the death of…
David’s Alden’s Peter Grimes returns to the Coliseum
David Alden may have dragged George Crabbe’s eighteenth-century Suffolk Borough into the twentieth century, updating Britten’s Peter Grimes to the time of its composition and emphasising post-war parochialism and hypocrisy,…
From Darkness to Light: Barbara Hannigan opens the LSO’s new season at the Barbican
The London Symphony Orchestra was the first of the major orchestras to open their autumn season in September. Unlike their brethren across the Thames (to the south), they chose not…
Die Frau ohne Schatten at Neuköllner Oper
One often hears that Berlin has three opera houses. In fact, it has many more. Among the most engaging is the Neuköllner Oper. Situated in a funky Berlin neighborhood, it…