18th century
Hughes, Manchester Collective, Hallé St Peter’s, Manchester review - new work and stunning singingFriday, 24 June 2022
Manchester Collective were back on home ground last night in the tour of a programme featuring the first performances of a new song cycle by Edmund Finnis, Out of the Dawn’s Mind. Soprano soloist was the amazing Ruby Hughes.It was home ground for... Read more... |
The False Servant, Orange Tree Theatre review - Marivaux's cruel comedy gets a modern spinWednesday, 15 June 2022
There probably isn’t a more able translator of vintage drama than Martin Crimp, the playwright whose 2004 version of Pierre Marivaux’s 1724 play about deceit, greed and sexual politics has been revived at the enterprising Orange Tree. The finale has... Read more... |
Tamerlano, The Grange Festival review - Handel brilliant in parts, but you have to wait for the dramaSaturday, 11 June 2022
Handel’s operas have long posed, and still pose, severe problems for the modern theatre, and especially the modern director – all those endless streams of wonderful but emotionally more or less generalised arias hitched to interchangeable... Read more... |
Orfeo ed Euridice, Blackwater Valley Opera Festival review - heavenly possibilities, devils at work in the detailsTuesday, 07 June 2022
"Elysian" is the best way to describe the dream gardens of Ireland's Lismore Castle in early June: lupins, alliums and peonies rampant in endless herbaceous borders, supernatural perspectives towards the main building on various levels. This year’s... Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Garsington Opera review - gambling with the highest stakesFriday, 03 June 2022
The scene is Monte-Carlo, around the beginning of the last century: a carefully observed world of cloudless skies, glittering seas, high society and careless privilege shared with Death in Venice. John Cox’s staging works in cool harmony with the... Read more... |
Serse, The English Concert, St Martin-in-the-Fields review - star turns from five remarkable womenFriday, 06 May 2022
You know great singing when you hear it. In Handel, for me, that was when Lucy Crowe took over a Göttingen gala back in 2013; in Mozart, most recently, it came from Emily D’Angelo making her Royal Opera debut in La clemenza di Tito. Last night, in... Read more... |
Esfahani, CBSO, Morlot, Symphony Hall Birmingham review - ghostly enchantmentsFriday, 29 April 2022
Bent Sørensen has christened his new harpsichord concerto Sei Anime: “six souls”. The six concise movements, written for Mahan Esfahani and a chamber-sized orchestra, are modelled, apparently, on the dance movements of a Bach keyboard suite. But as... Read more... |
St John Passion, English Touring Opera, Lichfield Cathedral review - free-range Bach doesn't quite add upTuesday, 22 March 2022
JS Bach’s Passions as music theatre? Well, why not? Whatever the aura of untouchability around these works, they were always conceived as part of a bigger picture: a communal sacred ritual in which the divide between performer and audience wasn’t so... Read more... |
Don Giovanni, Welsh National Opera review - fine young cast let down by unhelpful conductingSaturday, 19 February 2022
If Don Giovanni is not the greatest opera ever written, it’s at least one of the very, very few that even in erratic performances have the capacity to seem it. There was so much wrong, in detail, with WNO’s revival of John Caird’s now eleven year-... Read more... |
Bajazet, Irish National Opera, Linbury Theatre review – robust but a bit roughSaturday, 05 February 2022
One thing’s clear from Irish National Opera’s bold championship of Vivaldi: he’s his own man when it comes to the stage, not some baroque generic, even if Bajazet is a pasticcio incorporating other composers’ music. He doesn’t characterize through... Read more... |
Theodora, Royal Opera review - God, love, sex, death - and terrorismTuesday, 01 February 2022
Some of Handel's late London oratorios, like the indestructible Semele, work well as fully staged operas. Others, usually the ones which swap mythology for the sacred, need dramatic help. Theodora is one of them, though Peter Sellars' now-legendary... Read more... |
Le nozze di Figaro, Royal Opera review - New Year champagneMonday, 10 January 2022
One of the galvanizing wonders of the operatic world happened when David McVicar’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro was new, back in 2006: the sight and sound of Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano in seamless dual role as... Read more... |
