The musical vaccination we all need against the bleak times ahead: ETO’s Cosi fan tutte reviewed
Anyone familiar with Joe Hill-Gibbins’s work will brace instinctively when the curtain goes up on his new Figaro. He’s the…
A lost opera from the most powerful musician you’ve never heard of: La ville morte reviewed
Who was the most influential figure in 20th-century classical music? Stravinsky? Pierre Boulez? What about Bernstein or Britten? John Cage…
One hell of a concert: Opera North’s Bluebeard’s Castle reviewed
Freud knew something about fear. Not the sudden shock of terror, but the creeping, sickening, slow-burn horror of the uncanny.…
Handsome and revivable but I wasn’t moved: Royal Opera’s Death in Venice reviewed
Premièred within two years of each other, Luchino Visconti’s film and Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice both take Thomas…
More Grace Kelly than Grace Jones: Welsh National Opera’s Carmen reviewed
How do you take your Carmen? Sun-drenched exotic fantasy with a side order of castanets, or cool and gritty, sour…
Why are so many operas by women adaptations of films by men?
Opera’s line of corpses — bloodied, battered, dumped in a bag — is a long one. Now it can add…
West Side Story’s flick-knife-to-the-guts thrill never landed its final blow
It was as though Damien Hirst had confessed a secret passion for Victorian watercolours, or Lars von Trier had admitted…
Deft, elegant and genuinely chilling: Garsington’s Turn of the Screw reviewed
Think of the children in opera. Not knowing sopranos and mezzos, pigtailed and pinafored or tightly trousered-up to look child-like,…
Testosterone and passion: Royal Opera’s Marriage of Figaro reviewed
Another turn around the block for David McVicar’s handsome 1830s Figaro at the Royal Opera — the sixth since the…
Saved by the chorus
We’ve cried wolf with Handel. Ever since the modern trend began for staging the composer’s oratorios we’ve hailed each one…
Where was the sex? Opera Holland Park’s Manon Lescaut reviewed
Where was the desire, the frisson, the flicker of attraction? Hell, where was the sex? I ask because a week…
An abdication of interpretative responsibility: Royal Opera’s Billy Budd reviewed
The climactic central scene of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd ends unexpectedly. The naval court has reached a verdict of death,…
Deft humour and daft imagery: WNO’s Magic Flute reviewed
Operas are like buses. Both are filled with pensioners and take ages to get anywhere, but more importantly they always…
Divulging the secret of the famous ‘King’s sound’?
Earlier this year The Spectator published an article in celebration of Evensong — the nightly sung service of the Anglican…
Opera North’s Tosca will leave you quivering
At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a…
Often baffling but ultimately entertaining: Britten’s Paul Bunyan reviewed
‘I feel I have learned lots about what not to write for the theatre…’ There’s a prevailing idea that the…
Currentzis’s Beethoven asked us to listen with our bodies rather than our minds
Some conductors conduct from the fingers — think of Gergiev’s convulsive gestures, flickering up and down the keyboard of an…