The Silver Bell was Saint-Saëns’s first opera, composed in 1864, but it turned out to have a protracted gestation to its first performance in 1877 (the theatre originally expected to host the premiere went bankrupt, and […]
As is well known, the founders of the Glyndebourne Festival in the 1930s originally envisaged it to be something of an English Bayreuth. In the event a smaller scale opera festival was established, such that no […]
Stepping in for Juanjo Mena, Brett Mitchell made an impressive Philharmonic debut. Based on the 30-year-long, almost-daily correspondence between American painter Georgia O’Keeffe and the German-born photographer Alfred Stieglitz, Kevin Puts’s Brightness of Light is an expansion […]
For this season’s visit to Carnegie Hall, part of a three-stop US tour, Harry Bicket and The English Concert performed Handel’s Baroque blockbuster, Giulio Cesare in Egitto, in its first-ever full-length presentation in this venue. With […]
The first instalment of Barrie Kosky’s Ring for the Royal Opera left us with the indelible impression – except for some critics who were bemused or offended by the sight of an elderly, naked woman […]
On one level an old-fashioned Sunday afternoon matinee, this impressive concert was also a more than usually comfortable fit for two ongoing series: the RPO’s own ‘Lights in the Dark’ strand and the Southbank Centre’s […]
Now that only the over-seventies can recall the half-century of semi-neglect which followed the world premiere of the Eighth, paradoxically Mahler’s biggest success in his lifetime, the old problem is stood on its ahead. Performances […]
Not yet 25, the latest Finnish Wunderkind (of partly Filipino heritage) began studying with renowned conducting teacher Jorma Panula at the age of 14. Today he has posts in Riga, Toulouse and Hong Kong, having […]
A respectable turnout greeted this quietly audacious programme. We began with the only item likely to be familiar to mainstream concertgoers whatever the variability of its line-up. The BBC Singers, who might have been joining […]
Floridante (1721) was the second full length work which Handel composed for his opera company, the Royal Academy of Music (in between that and Radamisto in 1720 had come his one Act contribution to Muzio […]
