For Handel’s Semele (1744) Oliver Mears and designer Annemarie Woods draw inspiration from the films of Luis Buñuel for their surreal horror. Cross that with The Marriage of Figaro and you get the interpretation they […]
To say that expectations were running high for this new dance version of the extraordinary 1979 film Quadrophenia would be to understate the atmosphere in the audience before the beginning of the show. Not only […]
John Savournin’s production of Lehár’s The Merry Widow (1905) – a score particularly known and loved for its evocation of bittersweet nostalgia and sentiment – moves the action to the notably unsentimental, ungentle context of […]
This was the last concert in the RPO’s ‘Lights in the Dark’ strand, here repurposed to encompass music by composers marginalised by gender expectations and/or issues of race and sexual preference. Some of the claims […]
There are times when the continuing obsession in musical circles for uncovering composers’ first thoughts concerning their works yields diminishing returns, as often, a creator will refine and improve. First is rarely best. That general […]
Paul Curran’s production of Johann Strauss’s operetta Die Fledermaus (1874) – composed in the heyday of Habsburg Vienna – brings the action forwards to the 1920s or early ’30s, bearing with it a great deal […]
In essence, the story of the ‘fallen woman’ of Alexandre Dumas’s play (the literary source for Verdi’s opera) is simply a modern, secularised version of the age-old Christian trope of the wayward, sinful woman who […]
The final program in this Met Orchestra season opened with Antrópolis by Gabriel Ortiz, the current holder of the Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. A ten-minute work inspired by the legendary dance halls and nightclubs […]
The evening began with an engrossing account of Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in G-minor, powerful on a modern piano, especially as interpreted by Hewitt on her brilliantly toned, four-pedal Fazioli. She played throughout with crystalline articulation and […]
Like its operatic sibling The Marriage of Figaro, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville is so perfectly formed a comedy that it almost directs itself and a good performance is virtually guaranteed. But such is its […]
