fri 11/07/2025

19th century

Brahms Cycle 1: Kavakos, Dindo, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Chailly, Barbican

For the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s second residency at the Barbican Centre Riccardo Chailly pulled focus on an entirely new sounding Brahms. Gone were all those bad performance practices, bad habits, from the early 20th century, gone was the...

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The Paradise, Series Two, BBC One

“Everything has happened so quickly,” Katherine Glendenning mused as the new series of The Paradise shot off the block. She'd been en voyage for a year, losing a father and gaining a husband, but now Katherine was back. Moray’s melancholy...

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Les Vêpres Siciliennes, Royal Opera

First fanfare had to be for the Royal Opera House’s main gambit in Verdi bicentenary year, staging its first ever Sicilian Vespers 158 years after the Paris premiere. Any of Verdi’s operas from Rigoletto onwards deserves the red carpet treatment,...

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The Sleeping Beauty, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler’s Wells

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good. Sometimes, of course, it’s even better to be both. And Birmingham Royal Ballet, in their all-too-brief London season, have been both lucky and good. Lucky, because they have Peter Wright’s little jewel of...

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Great Expectations, Bristol Old Vic

Neil Bartlett, as he has demonstrated in his earlier Dickens adaptations of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, knows how to make gripping theatre out of a complex work of fiction. His Great Expectations rattles through the twists and turns of Pip’s...

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Don Quixote, Royal Ballet

The opening night of the autumn season brings a gala first night, Carlos Acosta’s staging of Petipa’s Hispano-Russo-Austro-Hungarische castanet-fest, Don Quixote, with starry leads (Marianela Nuñez and Acosta himself), a very obviously expensive new...

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Philharmonia Orchestra, Salonen, Royal Festival Hall

“Lighting design”. Are there two more terrifying words to find in a concert booklet? Since I last went to a normal concert, it seems that the lunacy that is the tradition of bathing audience and stage in as much light as possible as if we were some...

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Listed: Jane Austen provides

Right at the start of the boom around 20 years ago, a Hollywood mogul is said to have told one of his people to get some more work out of that Jane Austen. She seemed like a good source of romantic comedies. Regrettably for all, there were only ever...

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Anne Schwanewilms, Roger Vignoles, Wigmore Hall

So we glide between seasons from one communicative diva giving her all in a vast space to another casting spells in intimate surroundings. While Joyce DiDonato, not perhaps one of the world’s great voices but certainly a great performer, was...

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Prom 73: Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis

It’s not because I lament the annual end of a love-hate relationship with the Albert Hall that the last few days of Proms feel rather melancholy. A bittersweetness lies rather in the drawing-in of evenings, however hot it is, so late night Schubert...

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Prom 72: Calleja, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, Zhang

It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese...

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Prom 69: Hadland, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Petrenko

May I be permitted a rude, opinionated intermezzo between reflections on Vasily Petrenko’s two Oslo Philharmonic Proms, and before Marin Alsop steps up to great expectations for the Last Night? Here’s another Russian in trouble, not for keeping mum...

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