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…
Cornelius Meister opens Bayreuth Festival 2022
Press Release Stuttgart, 25 February 2022 Cornelius Meister, Staatsoper Stuttgart’s General Music Director, will conduct the opening of this year’s Bayreuth Festival. Meister will make his debut at the Festspielhaus…
Covent Garden’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ Rigoletto
In his first production since taking up his appointment as Director of Opera in 2017,Oliver Mears’s thought-provoking staging clearly acknowledges Rigoletto as a timeless classic. His presentation debuted in September…
Werther in Monte-Carlo
A superb cast, an inspired maestro, an intimate theater, an operatic masterpiece (the eighteenth of Massenet’s thirty-six operas), Werther in Monte-Carlo was a thrilling bombardment of emotional crises. From the…
Carolyn Sampson, Tim Mead and Arcangelo explore German-Italian crosscurrents at Wigmore Hall
This concert at Wigmore Hall by Arcangelo, under their director Jonathan Cohen, explored German-Italian cultural crosscurrents in the early 18th century. So, we had a motet dating from the Italian…
As the leaves fall: impressive new choral disc from Guildford Cathedral Choir
The music of Harold Darke and Maurice Duruflé might seem curious bedfellows on this recent disc from Guildford Cathedral Choir, with girls’ and men’s voices, issued by Regent. Yet both these relatively…
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…