I Can’t Sing! London Palladium
The names have been changed to protect the guilty but half the fun of I Can’t Sing! – the so-called X-Factor musical – lies in the relentless spoofing of a show we love to hate and a…
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal Opera House
Die Frau ohne Schatten is an opera awash with high-flown symbolism and dubious, if not downright dodgy, sub-Freudian psychology. It peddles ludicrous notions about the inherent conflict between spiritual and physical love, frowning at the sex that…
The A-Z of Mrs P, Southwark Playhouse
The most ambitious musicals spring from the most unlikely sources – you need go no further than Stephen Sondheim to establish that – but turning those musicals from novelty into living, breathing, involving experiences requires very special…
London Philharmonic, Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall (Review)
Vasily Petrenko used his baton like a piratical rapier to galvanise the London Philharmonic violins in their flourishes of derring-do at the start of Berlioz’ Overture Le Corsaire. And the brilliance was in the quicksilver contrasts, the…
Richard Rodgers Day With Jason Carr & Friends
24th July 2014, Ryedale Festival An event for all lovers of Musical Theatre, Music Hall and the Popular Song. A double-concert celebration of arguably the greatest and most versatile popular melodist of them all, introduced by Edward Seckerson,…
Rigoletto, English National Opera, London Coliseum
The hunchback slumps in his chair like some malevolent watchkeeper – master of all he surveys. But as the black front curtain is drawn back like a shroud or veil of deceit, the world according to Rigoletto…
Happy Days, Young Vic
“Happy Days”. It’s a throw-away phrase, an all-purpose “we’re still here” pleasantry, a little more specific than “cheers” and perhaps a bit (some would say a lot) more hopeful. Samuel Beckett’s devastating play turns it into a…
A Conversation With VASILY PETRENKO: Shostakovich’s Symphony No 14
At its première in June 1969 Shostakovich described his Symphony No. 14, in effect a symphonic song cycle, as ‘a fight for the liberation of humanity… a great protest against death, a reminder to live one’s life…
A Conversation With REINHARD GOEBEL & MIRIJAM CONTZEN: New Mozart Violin Concertos recording
In Leopold Mozart’s old house (now a museum) in the Bavarian city of Augsburg a piano tuner is hard at work tuning one of the working exhibits – a venerable clavichord. Enter Reinhard Goebel and Mirijam Contzen…
London Symphony Orchestra, Jansen, Pappano, Barbican Hall
There were, it seemed, enough trumpets to serve Gabriel throughout eternity – and, as fanfares go, this one was stretching a point and then some. LSO On Track had commissioned it from Sir Peter Maxwell Davies and…
