Memorable singing and vivid orchestral playing enliven Grange Festival’s Traviata

Grange Festival’s new production of Verdi’s tragedy brings magnificent singing and much superb playing from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Richard Farnes who makes his house debut. Director Maxine Braham,…

A Captivating Il barbiere di Siviglia at the New National Theatre Tokyo

Josef E. Köpplinger’s 2005 production of Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia celebrated its fifth revival in Tokyo this year. At the matinee on June 1st, the NNTT was filled with…

InSeries’ Ethiopia: A Premiere Worth The 90-Year Wait

In 1937, while aggression from Mussolini’s Italy threatened to destroy the empire of Ethiopia, and Emperor Haile Selassie pleaded his country’s case with the League of Nations, Arthur Arent saw…

Emphatic singing characterises much of Garsington’s darkly imagined Queen of Spades

When Tchaikovsky’s card-game opera first appeared at London’s Drury Lane Theatre in 1915, it was announced by The Times as ‘a romance’. That’s marketing for you and pushing things a…

Harvey Milk Reimagined at San Francisco’s Opera Parallèle

Recalling a very dark moment in San Francisco’s history, Michael Korie and Stewart Wallace’s Harvey Milk Reimagined [for small operatic forces], arrived, via St. Louis, finally in San Francisco. This…

Porgy and Bess at Washington National Opera

Who can resist an English-language opera in the U.S. capital, especially one whose original production starred two D.C. natives, Todd Duncan and Anne Wiggins Brown? If this production of Porgy…

Chelsea Opera Group make a creditable addition to their repertoire of neglected operas in Bellini’s La straniera

Having presented Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys, based on a Breton legend, back in March, Chelsea Opera Group now gave another opera set in Britanny, Bellini’s La straniera (1829). It’s another…

The whimsical, the valedictory and the heroic: three sides of Richard Strauss

Sometimes comments are voiced to the effect that you’d never know Jane Austen had been writing in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, since there isn’t a single reference anywhere…

A provocative musical and dramatic satire upon the legacy of Wagner opens Longborough’s 2025 season

The matter of Wagner’s antisemitism – or, more to the point, whether it permeates his work, and its influence upon subsequent German cultural and social history – is a debate likely to…

An impressive season-opener from Opera Holland Park’s Flying Dutchman

It seems entirely appropriate that Holland Park Opera’s first venture into Richard Wagner should be Der fliegende Holländer. And where better in London to experience its storm-tossed drama within an…