Arminio was the first new opera in Handel’s 1736-37 season at Covent Garden, performed for the first time on 12th January 1737. After six performances it was withdrawn and remained…
Wexford Festival Opera 2023
Public Booking for 72nd Wexford Festival Opera opens on 10 th May 202370 events, 13 days from 24th October to 5th November 2023 General booking for Wexford Festival Opera opens…
Bampton Classical Opera 2023: 30th Anniversary Season
Bampton Classical Opera celebrates its 30th anniversary season with a busy calendar of events, the highlight being the UK première of Salieri’s ‘At the Venice Fair’ (La fiera di Venezia). The…
La Juive in Hannover: a medieval tale for the modern age
Three days before Lydia Steier’s 2019 production of Fromental Halévy’s La Juive received its first revival at the Staatsoper in Hannover, a British MP – a Minister for Immigration –…
A joyless Orfeo in Hannover
“On this happy and auspicious day which marks the end of the amorous sufferings of our demi-god, let us sing, shepherds, such sweet melodies, that worthy of Orpheus may be…
Victorian Villainy: Opera della Luna at Wilton’s Music Hall
Frankenstein’s ‘creature’, Count Dracula, Henry Jekyll-Edward Hyde: nineteenth-century fiction has furnished some notable literary monsters who continue to captivate the contemporary imagination. Sweeney Todd, barbarous barber and supplier of sickening…
Tosca in San Jose (CA)
There was Tosca at Berlin’s Volksbühne sung by actors (not singers), there was Tosca at the Aix Festival documenting the demise of an aged diva. But mostly Tosca is the…
The Three Choirs Festival presents Vaughan Williams’ The Pilgrim’s Progress: in conversation with Charlotte Corderoy
As an inscription to his 1925 oratorio Sancta Civitas, Ralph Vaughan Williams drew on the words of Plato: ‘A man of sense will not insist that things are not exactly…
Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence at the Royal Opera House
Kaija Saariaho’s latest opera, first seen at the 2021 Festival d’Aix en Provence, has now reached another of its co-commissioners, the Royal Opera House. It would be difficult to overstate…
In conversation with Liberata Collective: Handel’s Orlando at the Buxton International Opera Festival
“In opera, the most profound music, the most well-chosen words, will not contribute to the drama if the action is not coherent … every detail of the visual aspects of…