Reviews

Barbican, London Daisy Evan’s bold new version – reflecting on national identity – was strongly performed, but the update failed to bring much needed coherence to Dryden’s vast text Purcell’s King Arthur has long been a problematic work. It’s not quite an opera, not...

On a day when events in Las Vegas cast a shadow over much of the news this was not the most comfortable recital to sit through for many reasons. The chosen repertoire did, at times, feel unduly heavy - and very Germanic - but it was also unevenly sung. Indeed, it was...

No sooner had I drafted my review of Simon Mayr’s Medea in Corinto, recently posted      on OperaToday.com, than the world-premiere recording of Mayr’s Telemaco nell’Isola di Calipso reached me, an opera from 16 years earlier, when Mayr was 34 years old. Franz Hauk,...

What did Alexander Scriabin have in common with Donald J. Trump? Small hands, that’s what. Scriabin’s 1897 piano concerto was an instant hit with similarly endowed artists, although it also won approval from Sergei Rachmaninov, whose mitts were mega-sized. Despite...

Writing of McDermott’s Satyagraha in 2010, one of my colleagues wrote, ‘There are so many amazing imagesin this production that it’s hard to take them all in at once’. Here, it’s more a case of the are so many diverse visual images that it’s hard to make them come...

Coliseum, London Phelim McDermott’s new production for ENO features some virtuoso turns and preserves the tragedy’s air of mystery, but at times lacks cohesion English National Opera’s new production of Aida is the work of Phelim McDermott, whose previous stagings for...

Romanian soprano Aurelia Florian sings Violetta in all ten performances (through October 17). She is young and pretty, her voice is strong and rich throughout all registers, and her high notes are splendid (she does not take the optional high E flat in the “Sempre...

Bellini’s 1831 opera “Norma,” which opened the Metropolitan Opera’s season on Monday, is rich in themes that resonate in today’s political and social climate. Brutal, boorish clashes of culture and religion drive the story. The title character, a high priestess of a...

This, and the striking opening of the first piece, Palestrina’s motet Laudate pueri, set me ruminating about nature of an ‘ensemble sound’, and although the following tangential digression might be a little indulgent, it is not irrelevant to my experience and review...