It’s the second school “outing” of the season. First Christopher Alden took Britten back to visit his past in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at ENO and now Robert Carsen is playing schoolboy heroics and fantasy football with…
One can only hope that the ill wind which strips away the cherry blossom at the close of Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s feeble 2003 production of Madama Butterfly might soon carry off the entire staging. I’ve…
The most surprising thing about Two Boys is the consonance and quiet sensuality of the score. Many words spring to mind: elegiac, mournful, poetic, melismatic – a digital age score without digitalisms, without electronics, actual or simulated,…
Willy Decker’s 1994 production of Britten’s Peter Grimes has not worn well and pales now in the shadow of David Alden award-winning staging down the road at English National Opera. That, too, is due for revival. Decker’s…
Her appearances in this country are rare enough as it is so to discover that Maria Joao Pires was to be a late substitute (for the indisposed Murray Perahia) was precious consolation indeed. She played Mozart’s last…
Liszt and Wagner, Boulez and Barenboim – iconic names, analogous kinships. As conductors and musical soulmates both Boulez and Barenboim have boldly sought and found satisfying answers to the Wagner myth but who, one wonders, could have…
It’s all a little unlikely: Protestants and Jews in rural Alsace, Yiddish melodies given a distinctly Italianate spin, the longest and most infuriating foreplay in opera, and not one single death. I’m not sure when there was…
It doesn’t take long to establish that there is an extraordinary director at work here. The body language, the tangible involvement of every character on stage, the way in which emotional journeys are charted and feelings expressed…
Leonard Bernstein’s most bountiful score – a mouth-watering confection of sugar and spice and all things nice – is also a masterpiece of parody and counter-parody. Voltaire’s Candide was short and pithy; Bernstein and his legion of…
The sun really smiled on the opening of Garsington Opera’s handsome new summer pavilion at the Getty’s Wormsley estate – but in doing so it rather turned Mozart’s Magic Flute on its head flooding light and enlightenment…