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…
Madama Butterfly in Williamsburg
Minimalism in the Commonwealth of Virginia — an iconic opera in rarefied format achieved a powerful presence. Maestro Jorge Parodi’s orchestra of single winds, two horns, strings 3,2,1,2,1, piano, timpani…
Seamless, genial comedy for Glyndebourne’s The Barber of Seville
This revival of Annabel Arden’s production of The Barber of Seville for Glyndebourne happily falls within the same season in which its sequel The Marriage of Figaro will also be…
Weill’s Der Protagonist in Venice
The recent run of Kurt Weill’s Der Protagonist at Venice’s Teatro Malibran offered a welcome opportunity to hear a great composer’s first and unjustly neglected opera. While its premiere in…
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown: Opera North’s Simon Boccanegra
What links Verdi with Shakespeare is a keen awareness of the distinction that needs to be made between the public and the private man: an individual may project a particular…
What comes after the very end? Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde offers some answers
Some composers, like Dvořák for instance, seemed at home in whichever genre they chose to write. Mahler, by contrast, though he repeatedly wrote for the human voice, never attempted an…
Glyndebourne’s musically gripping Parsifal
Directors have a habit of interfering with composers’ intentions in their efforts to draw out new perspectives. That’s no bad thing when a novel approach creates insightful correspondences with the…
A choral and orchestral extravaganza from The Lighthouse, Poole
Hats off to David Hill for overseeing the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s last hurrah of the season with three career-defining works that changed the musical landscape in both Britain and the…