This autumn Bampton Classical Opera will be giving performances of Handel’s Clori, Tirsi e Fileno, one of his most extended and loveliest cantatas, at venues in Sussex, Oxfordshire and Surrey. Also known…
Monteverdi’s Orfeo at Garsington Opera
What is most striking about John Caird’s new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo at Garsington Opera is the extent to which it reminds us that the humanist theories informing the aesthetic…
Kathryn Rudge sings an exquisite Sea Pictures beside Vasily Petrenko’s safe Mahler Sixth
The coupling of Elgar’s Sea Pictures and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony is not an obvious one. One tangible link is that Mahler conducted Sea Pictures in the final year of his…
Hamlet at the Met
Today, with post-romanticism and minimalism in decline, most new operas fall into one of two categories. They are either “popularist” or “modernist.” Populist operas are crossover works. Building on Gershwin’s…
Missed chances and haunting memories: Eugene Onegin at Opera Holland Park
If the first night of Julia Burbach’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at Opera Holland Park marked the start of London’s summer opera season, it certainly didn’t mark the start…
A gripping Siegfried at Longborough Festival Opera
There’s something wholly satisfying when an opera is allowed to breathe its own magic without overworked directorial interference. This new production of Siegfried – originally planned for 2021 – forms…
Chelsea Opera Group present a superb Andrea Chénier at the Southbank
The 2022 summer opera season has been getting well and truly underway this week, with first nights at Opera Holland Park (Eugene Onegin) and Garsington (Orfeo), following Glyndebourne’s production of…
Samson et Dalila at the Royal Opera House
To describe Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila as ‘old-fashioned’ doesn’t seem controversial. The French composer’s score harks back to the past with its allusions to Handelian fugue and Bachian chorale, betraying…
Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers at Glyndebourne
It’s not often that a Glyndebourne production offers its audience an interactive experience. But, that’s what seemed to be happening towards the close of the final Act of the second…
The Vache Baroque Festival 2022: in conversation with co-founder Betty Makharinsky
The myth of Orpheus and the story of opera are inextricable. Gifted the first musical instrument, the lyre, by his father, Apollo, Orpheus and his art represent man’s need to…