Purcell and Schoenberg: my kind of double bill. Puritan ‘authenticity’, or whatever it is calling itself at the moment, is so all-pervasive when it comes to the seventeenth century that…
Itch: a new opera by Jonathan Dove at Opera Holland Park
Simon Mayo’s book Itch was written, originally, for his science-loving son; two more books and a TV series later, Itch is now an opera by Jonathan Dove with a libretto by Alasdair Middleton based…
Wozzeck at the Aix Festival
Finally! Cancelled in 2003 by a strike, postponed in 2020 by Covid, Alban Berg’s expressionist masterpiece Wozzeck has just been given 5 performances at Aix’s Grand Théâtre de Provence —…
‘Mozart and the Munich Hofkapelle’: an enlightening evening
To the Munich Residenz’s Rococo Cuvilliés-Theater, once simply the Residenztheater, for a fascinating concert entitled ‘Mozart and the Munich Hofkapelle’. It was here, on 29 January 1781, that Idomeneo received…
The bohemians go to the movies at Opera Holland Park
Giacomo Puccini’s operatic career, from the early 1890s to his death in 1924, roughly coincided with the emergence and early development of cinema and sound recording. However, unlike many of…
Semele in Munich
I was sceptical, I admit, for the first two acts of Claus Guth’s new production of Semele, but it came together and offered an anthropological and psychoanalytical interpretation of Handel’s…
Così fan tutte in Munich
It is refreshing to find a Così fan tutte that takes the very greatest of Mozart and Da Ponte’s three masterpieces (for the most part) seriously. The amount of nonsense…
Cosi fan tutte at the Aix Festival
The Aix Festival was founded 75 summers ago as an altar to the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (in French it is pronounced Mose-art). This year Cosi is up again…
Kenneth Leighton: Every Living Creature – a revelatory and truly rewarding disc by Londinium
At the opening of Kenneth Leighton’s Symphony No.3 ‘Laudes musicae’ (1984), the tenor soloist sings the composer’s own hymn of praise: “O yes, I must sing! And so must you…
The choral music of Ivo Antognini is superbly sung by the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge
On this disc of a cappella choral music by the Swiss-born Ivo Antognini (born 1962), issued earlier this year by Hyperion, the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge yet again demonstrate…