An evening of high drama: a very public altercation between conductor and concert master, a Wagnerian memory lapse from the leading lady, but one of the most thrilling accounts of Die Walküre you will ever hope to…
Senses we didn’t even know we had come alive with the sound of that E-flat sunk so deep in string basses that it can be felt as well as heard. But the frisson we experience as this…
As Donizetti’s Overture chortles into life the scheming Dr Malatesta spirits us through the chambers of Don Pasquale’s residence, emerging through wardrobes, disappearing through wall paintings, a stealthy and surreal presence. His playthings – the characters in…
Death becomes him. Enter Thomas Adès, composer, conductor, and now grim reaper. The much-anticipated World Premiere of his Totentanz rolled into the Proms like a black juggernaut, an invitation to the dance that none could resist sitting…
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…