Reviews
Sondra Radvanovsky gives a flawless recital
Reviewing a concert given by an artist with a voice like the stentorian soprano Sondra Radvanovsky has, is a very difficult task for a music critic. After all, how can one criticize something that is flawless! Such was my experience after attending the recital she...
The Genius of Purcell: Carolyn Sampson and The King’s Consort at the Wigmore Hall
Framed at the centre of the platform by bass violist Reiko Ichise and theorbo player Lynda Sayce, with violinists Cecilia Bernardini and Huw Daniel to right and left, and Robert King’s harpsichord and chamber organ to the rear, Sampson looked and sounded the epitome...
Review: Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas; Rolfe’s Aeneas and Dido, Oct. 21, 2017
To open its 17/18 farewell season on October 21, Toronto Masque Theatre presented a double bill of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Aeneas and Dido, a new work with music by James Rolfe and libretto by André Alexis. Specializing in the artistic fusion of music,...
Hamlet review – careers are made in a ferociously powerful trip to Elsinore
By: Tim Ashley for the Guardian (UK) Glyndebourne, Sussex Given its world premiere at Glyndebourne earlier this year, Brett Dean’s Hamlet, regarded by some as the most successful operatic adaptation to date of Shakespeare’s tragedy, has now entered the repertory for...
Written on Skin review – spare staging highlights richness of Benjamin’s opera
West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge The Melos Sinfonia’s thrilling concert performance of George Benjamin’s intense, horrifying work was often more dramatic than full productions In the five years since its premiere at the Aix-en-Provence festival, Written on Skin has...
La Traviata review – McVicar’s Verdi is a gorgeous but stilted visual treat
By: Rowena Smith for the Guardian (UK) Theatre Royal, Glasgow David McVicar’s staging of La Traviata has proved to be the kind of enduring production that opera companies want to have in their repertoire. Having been much performed in recent years, it is now being...
Lucy Worsley’s Nights at the Opera review – dressing up, singing and sex
This brilliant show flitted from Covent Garden to Venice to Vienna and Milan in pursuit of the history of opera I haven’t always had the best relationship with opera. My parents took me to a few – dress rehearsals – when I was a kid, probably with the aim of making me...
The Guardian view on the ‘yellowface’ casting row: classical music has a diversity problem | Editorial
The pulling of Peter Eötvös’s opera The Golden Dragon from the Hackney Empire must provoke some tough thinking The Hackney Empire in London announced last week that it had cancelled a performance of an opera that had come under fire from members of Britain’s east...
Les Vêpres Siciliennes review – an electrifying night at the Opéra
Royal Opera House, London Stefan Herheim’s take on Verdi is restless, lurid and saturated with the opulence of the 19th-century Parisian opera house to which the action is relocated There is – to risk sounding obtuse – an awful lot of opera in Stefan Herheim’s take on...
Review: The Elixir of Love at the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Toronto, Oct. 11 2017
Smalltown Canada setting Donizetti’s rustic melodramma giocoso (comic opera) The Elixir of Love returned to the Canadian Opera Company on October 11 for the first time since 1999, in a new-to-Toronto production by American director James Robinson. The action has been...
The Devil Came Up to Boston for Cerise Lim Jacobs’ New Opera, “REV. 23”
REVIEW of REV. 23, a new comic opera that sees beyond the End of Days, conceived and written by Cerise Lim Jacobs, with a score by Julian Wachner; performed September 29, September 30, and October 1, 2017 at Boston’s John Hancock Hall; viewed here September 30 and...
From the House of the Dead review – Welsh National Opera’s landmark staging demands to be heard
Millennium Centre, Cardiff Welsh National Opera’s revival brings David Pountney’s 1982 version back to grim and glorious life and restores Janáček’s original musical vision Janáček’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s partly autobiographical novel, set in a Siberian prison...