It could catch on again – the conductor with an ornate staff whacking out the tempo on the podium. At the court of Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Lully would have been thus equipped, conductor turning dancing master with…
The 119th season of BBC Proms opened not with a bang but with barely a murmur. A thrumming, like the beating of tiny insect wings, like the hum of summer, looked towards not just the season ahead…
Here she is, boys, here she is world, here’s… Well, maybe not quite yet. Patti LuPone’s accompanist and confessor and all round waspish side-kick this time around – Seth Rudetsky – was also her warm-up act. Writer,…
It’s the season of free love in Michael Grandage’s 1960s take on Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro – everybody’s at it; and since you can’t tell the men from the girls (or even the boys in Cherubino’s…
In Bergen’s Grieg Hall – one is tempted to say the Hall of the Mountain King – the 2013 Bergen Festival concludes with the mournful tolling of bells. A consonant “Amen” – like a healing benediction –…
The Major-Domo promises fireworks during the Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma, the director of Glyndebourne’s new staging, drops a bombshell – actually several bombshells. Glyndebourne’s wartime history – as a refuge for…
There are those who would argue that Liza (Minnelli, that is) has become so much of a self-parody that the best of her impersonators are actually more convincing than she is. That’s the cynical view, of course,…
If you should take your seats prematurely in the London Coliseum you’ll find yourself confronted with a group of serving British soldiers. You’ll shift a little uneasily under their gaze. There they are, staring, smoking, loitering; there…
Vladimir Jurowski deemed this the most challenging of any programme in the South Bank’s year long The Rest is Noise festival and proceeded to tell us precisely why. That his little preamble lasted almost twice as long…
Liadov crafted more than his fair share of curtain-raisers – but to what end? One might imagine The Enchanted Lake – an atmospheric and beautifully scored miniature – as the prelude to an opera or full-length ballet;…