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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Hector Berlioz and Terry Gilliam were undoubtedly made for each other – kindred spirits with wild imaginations, impractical demands, and a touch of anarchy. But Berlioz was a chaotic dramatist at best and in a piece like…
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is a special and very particular opera. There is nothing else quite like it. Just as the drama – set to the composer’s own libretto – teeters between fear and faith so too…
The heat is on in Saigon – and 25 years after its world premiere Cameron Mackintosh has just turned up the thermostat. Boublil and Schönberg’s celebrated take on Puccini’s Madam Butterfly has always been my favourite of…
You can count on Richard Jones for challenging our perceptions and turning expectation on its head but the image of the Marschallin rising Venus-like from her bath while showers of water rain down like gold dust on…
On the Richter scale of catchiness Richard Adler and Jerry Ross’ songs for The Pajama Game are right up there. Quite who did what in their brief but shining songwriting partnership was never entirely clear, though Adler…
