Classical Source Reviews

Vaughan Williams’s The Poisoned Kiss (completed 1928, premiered 1936) mixes gothic fantasy (or fairy tale) with quirky (if sometimes simplistic) humour, arriving at an improbably happy resolution with no fewer than six couples paired off in marriage […]

This was both an impressive concert in its own right and a more comfortable fit for the RPO’s ongoing ‘Lights in the Dark’ series than some of its scheduled instalments. All three featured composers, obliged […]

Stéphane Denève led a superb performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem for which no recording had fully prepared me for the overwhelming emotional impact of this concert. In War Requiem, Britten, a lifelong pacifist, juxtaposes the […]

Matthias Pintscher stepped in for Herbert Blomstedt who was unable to appear due to an ear infection, the Beethoven replacing Schubert’s Symphony No.6. Pintscher is a part-time New Yorker and on the composition faculty of the Juilliard […]

Part 3! Siegfried can be a tricky opera for any company to pull off for there are many issues and pre-conceptions to surmount: huge demands on the singer of the title role, the male-voice dominance […]

In the second instalment of The Ring, we move to the world of mortals, and to probably the most popular and familiar of the four works that comprise this masterpiece. It starts with the act […]

The Regent Opera Ring has been slowly built up over four years, with each opera usually being staged in the Freemasons Hall in central London. For Götterdämmerung, finally staged as part of this set of […]

Over the last few years, the Royal Opera has scored some considerable successes in presenting new operatic pieces with uncompromisingly difficult themes, sometimes inspired by great cinematic works – think Turnage’s Anna Nicole, Adès’ The […]

This carefully curated program, presenting a journey from darkness to light, opened with music by Juho Pohjonen’s fellow Finn, Jyrki Linjama. Merging the spiritual with the secular, the bright, lightly dissonant opus begins with gently […]

Returning to the New York Philharmonic, her hometown orchestra, Karina Canellakis led an ambitious program opening with Kaija Saariaho’s transcription of a movement from her La Passion de Simone, an oratorio based on the life of […]