Over the last few years, the Royal Opera has scored some considerable successes in presenting new operatic pieces with uncompromisingly difficult themes, sometimes inspired by great cinematic works – think Turnage’s Anna Nicole, Adès’ The […]
This carefully curated program, presenting a journey from darkness to light, opened with music by Juho Pohjonen’s fellow Finn, Jyrki Linjama. Merging the spiritual with the secular, the bright, lightly dissonant opus begins with gently […]
Returning to the New York Philharmonic, her hometown orchestra, Karina Canellakis led an ambitious program opening with Kaija Saariaho’s transcription of a movement from her La Passion de Simone, an oratorio based on the life of […]
Thea Musgrave’s quasi-historical prequel to Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda was staged by Leipzig Opera as recently as 2023 but this was the first opportunity in decades to see it in London. A work of the mid-1970s, its language […]
London already knows the incoming music director of the Royal Opera as an orchestral conductor of distinction in Mahler and the Czech repertoire, but Hrůša’s Shostakovich was new – to me at least – and […]
This typically thoughtful programme from Sakari Oramo was marketed as ‘an evening-long meditation on life and the hereafter’. The Lark Ascending is scarcely that – Ursula Vaughan Williams also maintained that her husband, a reluctant countryman, could […]
Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner’s epic of warring gods and mortals struggling for possession of the magic Ring that grants power to rule the world, takes at least fifteen hours to play out, but on this […]
On long walks during the live performance hiatus brought about by the Covid pandemic, Renée Fleming conceived what became her album, ‘Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene,’ juxtaposing vocal classics featuring imagery of nature with works […]
Jon Favreau’s comedy Elf, the story of Buddy, a human accidentally transported to the North Pole as a toddler and raised among Santa’s elves, who travels to New York City at age 30, in full […]
Over the past two decades a period-instrument aesthetic has dominated the Philharmonic’s annual presentations of Messiah with early-music specialists such as Harry Bicket, Jeanette Sorrell, Masaaki Suzuki and Fabio Biondi recruited to conduct them. This year Ton Koopman, founder […]
