18th century
The Goldberg Variations, De Keersmaeker, Kolesnikov, Sadler's Wells review - keyboard harmony and atonal danceWednesday, 07 September 2022Jean-Guihen Queyras and five dancers of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas company in the Bach Cello Suites was a thing of constantly evolving wonder. So too is Pavel Kolesnikov’s ongoing dialogue with Bach’s Goldberg Variations, different every... Read more... |
La donna del lago, Buxton International Festival 2022 review - Rossini’s romanticism for todayFriday, 15 July 2022Buxton International Festival’s opera scene is clearly back on track for 2022, and its most substantial production a taut and tension-filled presentation of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago.Jacopo Spirei’s production, with design by Madeleine Boyd, has... Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Royal Opera review - vibrant youth and vocal beautyThursday, 30 June 2022Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, a stunning Elsa in this Royal Opera season's revival of Wagner’s Lohengrin, was the lure to sit through Jan Philipp Gloger's Mozart Così again (the title, by the way – "All Women Do It" – belies the complexity applied... Read more... |
Hughes, Manchester Collective, Hallé St Peter’s, Manchester review - new work and stunning singingFriday, 24 June 2022Manchester Collective were back on home ground last night in the tour of a programme featuring the first performances of a new song cycle by Edmund Finnis, Out of the Dawn’s Mind. Soprano soloist was the amazing Ruby Hughes.It was home ground for... Read more... |
The False Servant, Orange Tree Theatre review - Marivaux's cruel comedy gets a modern spinWednesday, 15 June 2022There probably isn’t a more able translator of vintage drama than Martin Crimp, the playwright whose 2004 version of Pierre Marivaux’s 1724 play about deceit, greed and sexual politics has been revived at the enterprising Orange Tree. The finale has... Read more... |
Tamerlano, The Grange Festival review - Handel brilliant in parts, but you have to wait for the dramaSaturday, 11 June 2022Handel’s operas have long posed, and still pose, severe problems for the modern theatre, and especially the modern director – all those endless streams of wonderful but emotionally more or less generalised arias hitched to interchangeable... Read more... |
Orfeo ed Euridice, Blackwater Valley Opera Festival review - heavenly possibilities, devils at work in the detailsTuesday, 07 June 2022"Elysian" is the best way to describe the dream gardens of Ireland's Lismore Castle in early June: lupins, alliums and peonies rampant in endless herbaceous borders, supernatural perspectives towards the main building on various levels. This year’s... Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Garsington Opera review - gambling with the highest stakesFriday, 03 June 2022The scene is Monte-Carlo, around the beginning of the last century: a carefully observed world of cloudless skies, glittering seas, high society and careless privilege shared with Death in Venice. John Cox’s staging works in cool harmony with the... Read more... |
Serse, The English Concert, St Martin-in-the-Fields review - star turns from five remarkable womenFriday, 06 May 2022You know great singing when you hear it. In Handel, for me, that was when Lucy Crowe took over a Göttingen gala back in 2013; in Mozart, most recently, it came from Emily D’Angelo making her Royal Opera debut in La clemenza di Tito. Last night, in... Read more... |
Esfahani, CBSO, Morlot, Symphony Hall Birmingham review - ghostly enchantmentsFriday, 29 April 2022Bent Sørensen has christened his new harpsichord concerto Sei Anime: “six souls”. The six concise movements, written for Mahan Esfahani and a chamber-sized orchestra, are modelled, apparently, on the dance movements of a Bach keyboard suite. But as... Read more... |
St John Passion, English Touring Opera, Lichfield Cathedral review - free-range Bach doesn't quite add upTuesday, 22 March 2022JS Bach’s Passions as music theatre? Well, why not? Whatever the aura of untouchability around these works, they were always conceived as part of a bigger picture: a communal sacred ritual in which the divide between performer and audience wasn’t so... Read more... |
Don Giovanni, Welsh National Opera review - fine young cast let down by unhelpful conductingSaturday, 19 February 2022If Don Giovanni is not the greatest opera ever written, it’s at least one of the very, very few that even in erratic performances have the capacity to seem it. There was so much wrong, in detail, with WNO’s revival of John Caird’s now eleven year-... Read more... |