Regent Opera’s Die Walküre
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 […]
Classical Source Reviews
Regent Opera’s Das Rheingold
The Regent Opera Ring has been slowly built up over four years, with each opera usually being staged in the Freemasons Hall in central London. For Götterdämmerung, finally staged as part of this set of […]
Mark Anthony Turnage – Festen
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 […]
Juho Pohjonen piano recital at Lincoln Center
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 […]
New York Philharmonic – Karina Canellakis conducts Saariaho, Messiaen and Debussy – Veronika Eberle plays Berg’s Violin Concerto
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 – Mary, Queen of Scots
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 […]
BBC SO / Hrusa concert at the Barbican
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 […]
BBC Symphony Orchestra – An evening-long meditation on life and the hereafter
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 […]
New York Philharmonic – Nathalie Stutzmann conducts The Ring Without Words
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 […]
Renée Fleming & Inon Barnatan at the Kravis Center, West Palm Beach – “Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene”
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 […]
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