It is a Tristan well worthy of the Wagner shrine (not all Bayreuth productions are). Icelandic theater director Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson imposed a truly hermetic discussion of love onto the…
Der Fliegende Holländer in Bayreuth
Like all productions by Russian revisionist stage director Dimitri Tcherniakov, the Bayreuth 2021 Dutchman production is fraught with meaning, delving deeply into the contemporary resonances he discovers in nineteenth century…
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 24: Baroque meets Hip-Hop for Purcell’s The Fairy Queen.
Purcell’s ‘other’ stage works are beginning to receive recognition, at last; Dido and Aeneas has held sole sway for too long. Recently, Paul McCreesh recorded King Arthur (1691), while television…
Longborough Festival’s La bohème doesn’t fail to tug at the heartstrings
Good summer weather outside may have coincided with this run of La bohème, but Sarah Fahie’s production reminds us that Acts One and Two are set at Christmas Eve, with…
Santa Fe Opera’s Ravishing Rosenkavalier
Let me cut right to the chase and say that Santa Fe Opera’s stunning production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier has driven me stark raving glad. It was a long-awaited thrill…
Nikolaus Lehnhoff strips back action and ideas to create a calm dream-like state for Tristan und Isolde
‘A monument to this most beautiful of all dreams’ is how Wagner described the intoxicating contemplation of love that is his Tristan und Isolde, and it is essentially as a…
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…
Bodacious Bordeaux: Santa Fe Elixir
Santa Fe Opera’s piquant, frolicsome version of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore (The Elixir of Love) is currently regaling audiences with a revival of its popular 2009 staging. Director Stephen Lawless and…