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…
What a wasted opportunity: Jonas Kaufmann’s Four Last Songs reviewed
No wonder we have a problem with classical music in this country. The week started in celebration. The stats are…
A delicious operatic ragout of horror: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk reviewed
There is famously no door into the late-night diner of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. Its three silent patrons are trapped behind…
What’s in a name
Janacek is the master of the operatic title. Think of the slippery, sleight-of-hand emphasis of Jenufa in its original Czech…
Yet another dud Un ballo in maschera: Opera North’s new production reviewed
A chaste act of adultery and a silent conversation: these are the encounters at the heart of Un ballo in…
Nick Coleman hears better with half an ear than the rest of us do with two
If you’ve ever had a text or email thread spiral wildly and unexpectedly out of control or clocked a couple…
Partying like it’s 1899: two lieder recitals reviewed
If a symphony is, as Mahler famously put it, ‘like the world’, then songs and lieder are like seeing that…
Salon Strauss
An opera without singers, a Strauss orchestra of just 16, and an early music ensemble playing Mahler: welcome to the…
Soap opera
Previously on Giulio Cesare… English Touring Opera’s new season caters cannily to the box-set generation by chopping Handel’s Egyptian power-and-politics…
Vice and virtue
‘Can the ultimate betrayal ever be forgiven?’ screams the publicity for The Judas Passion, transforming a Biblical drama into a…
Mozart’s mischievous muse
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale,…
Grimes triumphant
‘Peter Grimes!’ Ranked high above us in the Usher Hall — a mob smelling blood, hot for the kill —…
Time to end authenticity
They say the first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem. So I’m staging an intervention and…
Risk assessment
Someone at the Buxton International Festival had a wry smile on their face when programming this year’s trio of operas.…
Music matters
The ancient Greeks had a word for it —katabasis, descending into the depths, to the underworld itself, in search of…
Soaring and singing
Whether it’s Coleridge’s nightingale or Petrarch’s, Ted Hughes’s wren or Shelley’s skylark, Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Max Porter’s crow, literature…
Bingeing on Bach
Coined in 1944, ‘completism’ is a modern term for a modern-day obsession. What began as a phenomenon of possession —…
Passion indeed
‘The dripping blood our only drink/ The bloody flesh our only food…/ Again, in spite of that, we call this…
The lost Stradivarius
Min Kym is a violinist, but if you Google her name you won’t find sound-clips or concert reviews, touring schedules…
Death becomes her
Opera is littered with the bodies of abandoned women. Step over Dido and Gilda, and you’ll still stumble into Donna…
Denial has rarely looked so good
Ceci n’est pas une Partenope. Forget the warring classical kingdoms of Naples and Cumae: this is surrealist Paris in the…
Thoroughly modern Monteverdi
‘Eppur si muove’ — And yet it moves. Galileo’s defiant insistence that the Earth revolves round the Sun, his refusal…
Thoroughly modern Monteverdi
‘Eppur si muove’ — And yet it moves. Galileo’s defiant insistence that the Earth revolves round the Sun, his refusal…
