Sir Bryn Terfel’s focus in the first half of this delightful recital was on the national identity and culture of his native Wales. With Bradley Moore at the piano, Terfel began with three Welsh-language songs, […]
Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is famously and beautifully a sparse opera, adapting the Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck whose drama is structured not so much as a continuous narrative as by its succession of episodes […]
Despite containing what is probably Rameau’s best known single piece of music (the keyboard piece Les Sauvages, arranged as the vocal ensemble ‘Forêts paisibles’) this is claimed to be the first fully staged performance in […]
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 […]
