Classical Source Reviews

A respectable turnout greeted this quietly audacious programme. We began with the only item likely to be familiar to mainstream concertgoers whatever the variability of its line-up. The BBC Singers, who might have been joining […]

Floridante (1721) was the second full length work which Handel composed for his opera company, the Royal Academy of Music (in between that and Radamisto in 1720 had come his one Act contribution to Muzio […]

Once again, Chelsea Opera exhumes an operatic rarity, one probably only known reasonably well by opera buffs with extensive collections of recordings, presenting a cogent argument for it being better known – perhaps even afforded […]

For the second time in a fortnight the LPO welcomed a lean, long-limbed guest conductor on top form. Hannu Lintu, currently chief conductor at the Finnish National Opera, began with a more than usually substantial […]

Vaughan Williams’s The Poisoned Kiss (completed 1928, premiered 1936) mixes gothic fantasy (or fairy tale) with quirky (if sometimes simplistic) humour, arriving at an improbably happy resolution with no fewer than six couples paired off in marriage […]

This was both an impressive concert in its own right and a more comfortable fit for the RPO’s ongoing ‘Lights in the Dark’ series than some of its scheduled instalments. All three featured composers, obliged […]

Stéphane Denève led a superb performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem for which no recording had fully prepared me for the overwhelming emotional impact of this concert. In War Requiem, Britten, a lifelong pacifist, juxtaposes the […]

Matthias Pintscher stepped in for Herbert Blomstedt who was unable to appear due to an ear infection, the Beethoven replacing Schubert’s Symphony No.6. Pintscher is a part-time New Yorker and on the composition faculty of the Juilliard […]

Part 3! Siegfried can be a tricky opera for any company to pull off for there are many issues and pre-conceptions to surmount: huge demands on the singer of the title role, the male-voice dominance […]

In the second instalment of The Ring, we move to the world of mortals, and to probably the most popular and familiar of the four works that comprise this masterpiece. It starts with the act […]