A third staging of French stage director Benjamin Lazar’s poetic and sophisticated production (Malmö in 2017 and Karlsruhe in 2019), highly refined in Montpellier by an early music tenor as…
A Twitcher’s Delight: Roderick Williams and Andrew West at Milton Court
A serious birdwatcher would take exception to being called a twitcher. Whereas the former is happy to wait patiently and passively for avian visitors to visit their locale, twitchers chase…
The cock crows: English Touring Opera presents Rimsky-Korsakov’s satire on incompetent autocracy
Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1907 fantasy-fable, The Golden Cockerel, brings together folklore and fact, angling Pushkin’s 1834 surreal satire on a Russian autocracy led by Nicholas I towards the Tsarist regime of Nicholas…
Origin: This is CLS
In 1971, the year in which he made his professional debut as a conductor, the late Richard Hickox founded the Richard Hickox Orchestra and the Richard Hickox Chorus, and commissioned…
Mixed performances in Menotti and Weir from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama
In food terms this was a programme comprising starter and main course, a well-designed menu beginning with a romantic comedy and followed by a picaresque meditation on fate with much…
Voices Unwrapped: Roderick Williams and members of the Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place
“Love, meet me in the green glen,Beside the tall elm-tree,Where the sweetbriar smells so sweet agen.” The poet-speaker’s call to his beloved to join him, at sunset, in the green…
The Cunning Little Vixen at English National Opera
Failure to love the operas—more generally, the music—of Janáček would be a strange, soulless thing indeed. It seems more to be opera companies, strange, incomprehensible entities, than opera-goers, be they…
Staging Handel’s Tamerlano: a conversation with Dionysios Kyropoulos
Tamerlane (1336-1405): Mongol conqueror, masterful military leader and tactician, murderous tyrant. The son of a nomadic shepherd Taraqai – a minor nobleman from the Barlas tribe – Tamerlane (also known…