The RPO is going from strength to strength these days and there was no mistaking the enthusiasm of players and audience despite the customary noises off: bronchial intrusions, mobile phone calls, the occasional whir of […]
Mostly with Mahler the old problem is stood on its ahead. Performances, even those of the unfinished Tenth, have become so frequent than it can be difficult to recapture the excitement they once engendered. Tweaked […]
The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players’ winter ‘mini season’ opened with a thoroughly charming performance of H.M.S. Pinafore, the fourth of the duo’s fourteen collaborations and their first breakthrough hit. This is the first Pinafore staged under Artistic […]
The Philharmonic marked this Yuletide season with a screening of Chris Columbus’s 1990 comedy, Home Alone, accompanied by John Williams’s Oscar-nominated score telling the story of eight-year-old Kevin McCallister, who defends himself and his home […]
This thoughtfully planned, totally captivating recital opened with a dreamy rendition of the melancholic Taneyev Prelude, Daniil Trifonov then tearing headlong into the fiendish, frenetic Fugue. As he leaned low over the keyboard, his dramatic […]
Glyndebourne is no stranger to Handel, nor to the Royal Albert Hall, with the company’s annual visit to the Proms. But this is the first time, I think, that its autumn season has seen an […]
Although nominally an opera seria like most of Handel’s other London operas of the 1720s and ’30s, English National Opera’s description of Partenope (1730) as a ‘rom com’ is closer to the mark. It has a levity and comedy that Handel […]
Marking the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet is touring the composer’s piano music. Over the course of three hours with two intermissions this recital was ravishing. Bavouzet has recorded Ravel’s music twice – […]
It was with Mahler and the Philharmonia that the Royal Opera’s new music director first made a mark with London audiences. His Puccini may or may not be considered wholly idiomatic but Jakub Hrůša is […]
Two rare one-Act operas featuring stories of jealous, murderous lust, offer some fascinating juxtapositions – Der Wald (premiered 1902), Ethel Smyth’s second opera, but a late essay in Wagnerian Romanticism if more sensational (and written in German); and […]
