Each year, Risor – a small fishing town on the south-eastern coast of Norway – hosts an internationally renowned festival of chamber music. This week some of its key players decamped to Wigmore Hall and naturally they…
What a journey we took here from the muted half-lights of Stravinsky’s Scherzo Fantastique to the tumultuous bell-laden prophecy at the close of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. Vasily Petrenko was at the helm of the London Philharmonic taking…
It’s a terrible old cliche that it takes a star to play a star – but in the case of Judy Garland there never has been and never will be a star big enough to fill her…
The premise is simple: can Professor Filipp Filippovich take a starving mongrel from the street and with a simple transplant of a man’s testicles and pituitary gland make him human? And if he can, what then? It’s…
Kaufmann and Gheorghiu were not the only star attractions of this early and clearly expensive Christmas gift from the Royal Opera. Cilea’s Frenchified melodrama hasn’t been seen in the house since 1906 and the dusty wing space…
The trick with Debussy’s Prélude à l’aprés midi d’un faune is to make the whole piece sound as free as the celebrated flute solo which awakens it. Tugan Sokhiev almost brought it off. Here is a conductor…
You couldn’t make it up: the water supply fails at the South Bank on the day they’re performing Singin’ in the Rain. I guess you call that a dry-run. At any rate it was the first ever…
In one respect at least Rufus Norris’ new ENO production of Don Giovanni might truthfully be described as electrifying. They are tinkering with the circuits before a single note has been sounded. “They” are the Don’s devilish…
Where has this idea come from that Kurt Weill somehow lost his edge or worse yet sold out when he headed Stateside? Have the people who perpetrate this nonsense actually heard the Broadway shows? The diversity of…
Jonas Kaufmann confounds our expectations on so many levels. His is a lyric tenor with a dark, grainy, dramatic core enabling a disarmingly wide range of French, Italian, and German repertoire in all its sensitivities. In his…