Jakub Hruša at the Royal Festival Hall
It was with Mahler and the Philharmonia that the Royal Opera’s new music director first made a mark with London audiences. His Puccini may or may not be considered wholly idiomatic but Jakub Hrůša is […]
Classical Source Reviews
Guildhall School of Music & Drama – Opera Double Bill – Smyth’s Der Wald and Respighi’s Lucrezia
Two rare one-Act operas featuring stories of jealous, murderous lust, offer some fascinating juxtapositions – Der Wald (premiered 1902), Ethel Smyth’s second opera, but a late essay in Wagnerian Romanticism if more sensational (and written in German); and […]
Glyndebourne Autumn Season 2025 – world premiere of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Railway Children – directed by Stephen Langridge; conducted by Tim Anderson
It’s been quite a year for Mark-Anthony Turnage, with the widely acclaimed premiere of Festen at the Royal Opera House, and now the premiere of another opera, The Railway Children, his first work for Glyndebourne. Festen adapted a 1990s Danish film, […]
New York Philharmonic – Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Stravinsky, Bartók and Boulez
Since 2024, when Jaap van Zweden ended his tenure as music director, the New York Philharmonic has been in a transitional period and will remain so until 2026, when Gustavo Dudamel assumes the directorship. With […]
Two shades of sombreness – the London Symphony Orchestra – Jansen and Pappano in Britten and Shostakovich
Some works emerge after an explosion of creative intensity in a matter of weeks; others sit and brood for some time before seeing the light of day. In part, Britten’s violin concerto was a reaction […]
New York Philharmonic – Gustavo Dudamel conducts Symphonies by Beethoven and Corigliano
For his second program in his season as the Philharmonic’s Music and Artistic Director Designate, Gustavo Dudamel showcased two Symphonies separated by nearly two centuries. Beethoven’s Fifth was masterfully performed, but it was John Corigliano’s […]
Vache Baroque Festival 2025 – Campra’s Le Carnaval de Venise
André Campra was an important figure in the development of French opera between the death of Lully (1687) and Rameau’s first example, Hippolyte et Aricie (1733) not least by pioneering the form of the opéra-ballet in L’Europe galante. Such works […]
Bampton Classical Opera – Salieri’s La locandiera
Like almost all of his musical contemporaries, Salieri has remained so much in the shadow of Mozart, that it’s easy to forget how precocious he also was in composition. La locandiera (1773) is his ninth […]
If Opera 2025 – Baroque Double Bill – Carissimi’s Historia Jonae and Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda
To close its season this year, If Opera presented this intimate, but still dramatic, pairing of two 17th century vocal works, sacred and secular side by side. Carissimi’s Historia Jonae is one of a series […]
If Opera 2025 – Verdi’s Rigoletto – with Alexey Gusev, Inna Husieva & Andrés Presno; directed by Nina Brazier; conducted by Oliver Gooch
Nina Brazier’s production of Rigoletto for If Opera (in its delightful new home at Church Farm, Wingfield) presents it as a lively historical spectacle, set at the court of Henry VIII (neatly translating the scene […]
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