The Royal Ballet’s standing as a serious classical dance company takes another hard knock with its latest programme, a double bill by the resolutely contemporary choreographic duo of Sol León and Paul Lightfoot which contributes […]
A curious programme with which to bring down the curtain on a successful season. Vasily Petrenko began with one of his well-intended homilies, promising us an evening of extremes but trailing off into unintelligibility when […]
Audience members had come from far and wide, making a kind of pilgrimage to this unlikely, austerely magical venue set in the Hampshire countryside. In recent years John Wilson and his hand-picked, high-octane orchestra have […]
The elements were no less a presence in the final concert of this week-long festival and provided the thematic ‘glue’ to an otherwise seemingly unrelated sequence of music. Proceedings began with a slice of juvenilia […]
Jennifer Higdon’s six-minute Fiery Red forms the second part of her two movement Piano Trio (a 2003 commission) and continues her preoccupation as to whether colour can convey mood. Whatever the answer, Emma Roijackers (violin), […]
Once again, Laura Rickard curated this week-long festival of a dozen or so events, this year turning her attention to the elements: earth, air, fire and water. For the first concert I attended, the natural […]
It’s been a year of firsts as far as Tosca is concerned: the Royal Opera House having begun the present season back in September with its first new production of the work in almost twenty […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
