Puccini “La Boheme”, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
More Basildon than Bastille, David McVicar’s grungy staging of La Boheme heralded the new millennium amidst concrete and steel, fire hazards and fire escapes, chavs and chav nots, bringing our “bohemians” into the here and now with…
A Conversation With STUART SKELTON
How did a nice Australian boy with a penchant for Rugby and Formula One gain entry into that most exclusive of clubs – the rarefied world of Opera? Stuart Skelton‘s response will only surprise you if you…
Janacek “The Cunning Little Vixen”, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
It might be deduced that the only thing worse than working with children and animals would be working with children as animals. But Leos Janacek was unfazed by the old Hollywood adage and his cartoon-strip derived opera…
Magdalena Kozenà, Mitsuko Uchida, Wigmore Hall
It’s extraordinary how the symbiosis of spirit and rightness of timbre between an artist and a composer can turn a recital around. The Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena is not a natural recitalist tending to overwork and over-illustrate…
Verdi “Falstaff”, Royal Opera House
Where there’s Falstaff there’s food. And Robert Carsen’s new staging of Verdi’s final operatic masterpiece plays like an ode to gastronomical excess. It begins with a binge and ends with a banquet and even the scene of…
London Symphony Orchestra, Kavakos, Gergiev, Barbican Hall
One bar into this timely celebration of his work and the composer’s identity could not be in doubt. The voice is unmistakable, of course, but so too a sense of the era in which he lived and…
Puccini “La Boheme”, Royal Opera House
Not just another revival of a venerable old staging but its 25th showing in the 50th year of director John Copley’s work at the Royal Opera House. They served up a cake and a vintage cast for…
Wagner “The Flying Dutchman”, English National Opera
The front curtain at the London Coliseum is a rare sight these days and suggested that we might for once be about to experience Wagner’s celebrated Overture without “illustration”. With Edward Gardner and the ENO Orchestra identifying…
Staatskapelle Berlin, Barenboim, Royal Festival Hall
The furtive opening bars of Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto No. 24 were shrouded in a mellowness of tone that made them welcoming rather than darkly unsettling and as the well upholstered sound of the venerable Staatskapelle…
The International Conductors’ Academy of the Allianz Cultural Foundation, Royal Festival Hall
A showcase for three young conductors, a malfunction at the printers, and for the first time in my experience no programmes for the audience and the prospect of blind-tasting their talents. Now there’s a thought – no…