Opera singers Ami Hewitt and Maria Hughes performed at a cultural event in PwC Ireland’s Spencer Dock offices. Artists Maria and Ami have both been supported by the partnership between the Festival and…
Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha brings an iridescent glow to Strauss’s Four Last Songs at the Proms
Copland, Hindemith and Strauss are not obvious bedfellows. However, the focus on the 1940s from either side of the Atlantic made perfect sense for this annual Prom appearance of the…
Santa Fe Orfeo: Jumbled Journey to Meow Wolf
In Santa Fe Opera’s first ever production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo, a funny thing happened on the way to Hades. Our hero seems to have wandered into an imaginative but perplexing…
Thrilling performances of Rachmaninov and Walton at the Proms
There’s a danger that a little-known work not previously performed in the UK may be all too quickly erased from memory when familiar works grab the listener’s attention, especially when…
Joel Frederiksen and Ensemble Phoenix Munich offer the lyric mastery of Walther von der Vogelweide
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the aesthetic and songs of courtly love travelled to Germany from Provence and northern France. Minnesinger, like their Romance counterparts, composed both the texts…
Anime Immortali: Franco Fagioli offers a portrait of Mozart and the castrato voice
Mozart probably isn’t the first composer whom one thinks of in association with eighteenth-century castrati. But, for over two decades – from Mitridate, re di Ponto K87/74a, written for the…
Opera Rara launch Donizetti Song Project at Wigmore Hall with Lawrence Brownlee & Carlo Rizzi
On Saturday 9 September, Opera Rara launch its Donizetti Song Project at Wigmore Hall with tenor Lawrence Brownlee and its Artistic Director Carlo Rizzi. Continuing its year-long celebration of Donizetti’s…
The Falling and the Rising at Camp Dodge, Iowa
For several seasons now, Des Moines Metro Opera has nurtured a fruitful collaboration with the Headquarters of the Iowa National Guard at Camp Dodge in a northwest part of the…
Mark Elder and the Hallé: a superlative Russian Prom of gripping power and intensity
Longevity clearly matters. I do not mean in the age of its conductors, although this sometimes is important, but by the length of time they have spent with their orchestras.…
An uplifting celebration of hybridity: Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Longborough
‘A rubbishy old play.’ Michael Burden, editor of the Eulenberg edition of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (the first to include the complete spoken text and music), explains that Restoration and…