This truly lovely recital represented the fruits of the introduction of the basso continuo at the end of the sixteenth century, which liberated polyphonic voices from their fundamental harmonic role…
Garsington’s Orfeo on OperaVision
With Autumn in the air, Garsington Opera is delighted to offer viewers the chance to relive one of the highlights of the summer festival. The 2022 production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo will…
Welsh National Opera’s The Makropulos Affair: a magnificent achievement
The question of why we should crave immortality is central to Janáček’s penultimate opera. As a composer he defied old bones and enjoyed an Indian summer, finding recognition during his…
Stanford: Children’s Songs – a generous, involving recital by Kitty Whately and Gareth Brynmor John
In 1906, Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) published The National Song Book, a collection of folk-songs, carols and rounds. In an address to a musical society in 1917, Arthur Somervell –…
Haute-couture opera with an industrial vibe: Costanzo, Handel and Glass at London’s Printworks
If one places in context where this program of Handel and Glass took place – the old and the contemporary – its historic setting seemed to have a real sense…
Characterful Mahler from Les Siècles, François-Xavier Roth and Sabine Devieilhe
Harmonia mundi’s recent disc of Mahler’s 4th Symphony provides a remarkably flowing and vivid account, fashioning a new perspective on a much-recorded work. Inner detail is heard afresh with instruments…
The Unravelling Fantasia of Miss H: a powerful operatic tribute to Mary Frances Heaton
She stood up one Sunday in St George’s church, the parish church of Doncaster, and interrupted the sermon, accusing the preacher of being “a whited sepulchre, a thief, a villain,…
The Trocs go to the opera? Vinci’s Alessandro nell’Indie with five countertenors at Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival
This was a brilliantly theatrical and superbly sung recreation of an opera reflecting the work’s premiere by an all-male cast. Max Emanuel Cencic’s Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival takes place in…
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Proms
John Eliot Gardiner surely named his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique with an intent that was thrillingly in evidence during this performance of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the instrumentalists being joined by…
Magic and Music: Wexford Festival Opera 2022 – in conversation with Rosetta Cucchi
Magicians and monsters, gods and ghosts, witches and the wonderous: the mysterious and the marvellous are woven into the fabric of opera, the music itself expressing the enigmatic and ineffable…