A single bottom C sunk deeper than even the deepest underground trains running so audibly below the Royal Festival Hall was the auspicious start to the South Bank Centre’s much anticipated festival “The Rest is Noise”. Forget…
You learn a lot about a composer from the pieces they revere – and for John Adams what might have seemed like an unlikely opening gambit to kick-start this short stack of three concerts with the London…
Why anyone these days would want to perform Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer with an interval when even the three act version was so plainly fashioned to be performed without one is beyond me. There is that tell-tale…
Building a memorable solo recital is an art in itself – that we know – but personalising it so precisely to your vocal character that it’s hard to imagine other voices even contemplating such a programme, now…
In the fictional museum of operatic history the Meyerbeer exhibit invites curiosity more than it commands respect. One sees his place in the grand – very grand – scheme of things, one can appreciate his influence, acknowledge…
It starts with the gunshot. It had to. Legions of Bodyguard aficionados who know the movie frame by frame will have cried blue murder if it hadn’t. So there it is – the opening scene of the…
Lehar’s Merry Widow has been been spreading enchantment across the globe for well over a century. She’s the vintage champagne of operettas and the prospect of John Wilson popping her cork was more than a little enticing.…
It seems inexplicable now that Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along should have bombed so ignominiously on its first Broadway outing in 1981. But then again what is clearer than ever from Maria Friedman’s…
Any young composer who finds himself at the opposite end of a programme from Walton’s First Symphony had better be good. Edward Nesbit – whose piece Parallels was commissioned by the LSO Panufnik Young Composer’s Scheme –…
The Britten Centenary began here, on his 99th birthday, on Saint Cecilia Day, at Wigmore Hall, and it seemed only fitting that the composer who gave him so much inspiration should have the first word – or…