Reviews

Royal Opera House, London Richard Jones’s new staging of Puccini’s opera is uncontroversial and precise, but Nicole Car is a touching Mimi and Antonio Pappano’s conducting is superb By the time it was finally retired in 2015, the Royal Opera’s previous production of...

Peacock theatre, London British Youth Opera’s compact revival showcases a strong ensemble cast Judith Weir’s second opera has hardly been seen in the UK since Scottish Opera commissioned it and gave the first performances in 1990. British Youth Opera’s resourceful and...

In fact, John Gilhooly, the Director of the Wigmore Hall, looked surprisingly relaxed on Saturday evening at the opening recital of the 2017/18 season - but, then, well he might since he had been fortunate in having Irish tenor Robin Tritschler available and willing...

Peacock theatre; Royal Albert Hall, London Potential opera stars seize their moment in The Vanishing Bridegroom and Don Giovanni. Plus, two miraculous hours of Bach from András Schiff If you shone a torch round the auditorium of London’s Peacock theatre in early...

Full credit, then, to director Olivia Fuchs, conductor Sian Edwards and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group for this imaginative, thoughtfully programmed and highly engaging contextualisation of the work - one which gave us not only eight songs for a mad King, but...

The musical memory had been jolted by the waltzing strains of Roses from the South, the arrangement which had kept an otherwise forgotten operetta alive in the minds of Strauss’s contemporaries and subsequent audiences. Written in 1880, six years after Die Fledermaus,...

Random drum beats, guitar noodling, rants about gig etiquette: a new opera draws together every live performance by the cult punk band – not the songs, but everything in between As the air is released from a bright red balloon, the stage erupts in a strict...

Already before Torvaldo e Dorliska Rossini had three of his major comedies under his belt (La pietra del paragone, L’italiana in Algeri and Il turco in Italia) and two successful tragedies (Tancredi and Elisabetta). But Torvaldo e Dorliska is a dramma semiseria — a...

And there’s more recent stuff, much more, mostly multi channel video and sound installations around the world that I won’t see All of Mr. Kentridge’s disciplines come into play in his opera productions, providing this prolific artist a rich palate of expressive tools....

Handel opera productions are famously fraught with troubling decisions — which voices to use, which gender to use for which voices, which dances to use from which opera. Sometimes decisions are made for you. Like, for example, Handel had no choice but to use the...