Gentleman Jack
Like a breath of bracing Yorkshire air, Northern Ballet’s brand-new Gentleman Jack swept into Sadler’s Wells, bringing a truly refreshing new narrative to the stage: the story of the ‘first modern lesbian’, Anna Lister aka […]
Classical Source Reviews
Vasily Petrenko and the RPO in Wagner and Taneyev
A very personal programme this, hardly one to attract crowds and very different in tone from the team’s multi-media take on Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie for the Southbank’s Multitudes festival. Both the RPO’s advance publicity and the conductor’s pre-concert […]
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Enyi Okpari with Martin James Bartlett at Lighthouse
Arnold Bax’s lavishly scored Tintagel was inspired by a holiday romance with pianist Harriet Cohen whilst visiting the north Cornish coast in 1917. Whether an evocation of Atlantic rollers, the castle-crowned cliff of Tintagel or an encapsulation […]
Wozzeck: Wretches like us
London’s South Bank Centre is following up 2025’s series of multimedia events with a further sequence entitled ‘Multitudes’. While inclusivity and genre-bending can sometimes amount to little more than an excuse for ceding art music […]
Messiaen’s Turangalîla-symphonie with animation – RPO/Petrenko with Stephen Osborne
As part of the Southbank Centre’s ‘Multitudes’ festival, pairing music with works in other art forms, this concert brought together Messiaen’s mighty Turangalîla-symphonie with a new film animation by 1927 Studios. One would have thought that Messiaen’s […]
Welsh National Opera – Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman – with Simon Bailey, Rachel Nicholls & James Creswell; directed by Jack Furness; conducted by Tomáš Hanus
In Jack Furness’s new production of The Flying Dutchman for Welsh National Opera, Senta becomes the drama’s focus, even before she is born. Her mother’s difficult labour pains are choreographed as the backdrop to the musical drama of the Overture, […]
Voices from Finland
Advance publicity promised not only ‘Sibelius in the raw’ but also ‘one of modern Finland’s most original young voices’. One wonders whether Lotta Wennäkoski was flattered or put out by that description. An established figure […]
Kurt Weill – Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
This statement opera, playing for 2 hours 40 minutes including a single intermission in its present incarnation, grew out of a more modest Mahagonny-Songspiel lasting little longer than tonight’s interval. The bigger stage work is by no means […]
The Wooden Prince and more from the LPO and Edward Gardner
A short homily from the conductor, required to explain that the interval had moved from that advertised in the printed programme, served also to introduce the music of Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915‑40). A Martinů student (and […]
Bohemian Rhapsodies from the LPO and Edward Gardner
A clever if geographically suspect marketing conceit unites two concerts in the LPO’s ongoing season. This was the first: four 20th-century pieces from central and eastern Europe which, to continue the pop analogy, have made […]
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