A Streetcar Named Desire, Young Vic
The first thing one needs to grasp about A Streetcar Named Desire – and director Benedict Andrews has seized hungrily upon it in his unnerving staging at the Young Vic – is Tennessee Williams’ sense of the…
Amadeus, Chichester Festival Theatre
Peter Shaffer has always been a big ideas man and the curse laid upon Antonio Salieri that he and he alone should recognise the genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart while all around him – not least himself…
A Conversation With SIR ANTONIO PAPPANO
Music Director of The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, Sir Antonio Pappano, world-renowned pianist and conductor, will tell us about his extraordinary musical background and life. In discussion with well-known interviewer Edward Seckerson, he will reveal just…
La Traviata, Glyndebourne
Images of Violetta taken to her bed or receding like a ghostly mirage into an eternity of solitude preface and conclude scene after scene of Tom Cairns splendid new staging at Glyndebourne. Designer Hildegard Bechtler has created…
Prom 1, Elgar “The Kingdom. Royal Albert Hall
Back in the Royal Albert Hall for the unveiling of Proms 2014 and speaking personally adjustments need to be made – the heat, for one, but also the acoustical amplitude. As Elgar rolled out the magisterial themes…
Forbidden Broadway, Menier Chocolate Factory
Since 1982 it’s been open season on the great and the good of Broadway musicals. It was in that very year that a chap called Gerard Alessandrini created Forbidden Broadway and from the hitherto innocuous sidelines of…
La finta giardiniera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
The title of the opera provides the essence of Frederic Wake-Walker’s staging. Finta – pretend, fake – and giardiniera – gardener – are key elements in a show where Arcadian bliss is not even glimpsed until the…
Carousel, Arcola Theatre
The first thing that strikes you about this joyously inventive postage stamp staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s masterpiece – and it strikes you so forcibly in this high-decibel digital age that it’s almost a pinch-yourself moment –…
London Symphony Orchestra, Luisi, Barbican Hall
It is not often we hear Bruckner’s colossal Eighth Symphony in its longer and far quirkier original version (1887 ed Nowak) and when we do hear it in either of its two incarnations it invariably stands alone.…
Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne
The darkness descends with the shocking first chord of the Overture brutally shutting out a beautiful day at Glyndebourne. Such comedy as there is in this show (and that aspect of the piece is kept well in…
