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…
Notes on a scandal
Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re…
Notes on a scandal
Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re…
Notes on a scandal
Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re…
All’s well that ends well
The last ten minutes of any Don Giovanni tell you more about a director than the previous two hours. Mozart’s…
All’s well that ends well
The last ten minutes of any Don Giovanni tell you more about a director than the previous two hours. Mozart’s…
All’s well that ends well
The last ten minutes of any Don Giovanni tell you more about a director than the previous two hours. Mozart’s…
Buried treasure
Wexford is to opera-goers what casinos are to gamblers. The uncertainty, the hope, the exhilaration — they’re all a crucial…
Buried treasure
Wexford is to opera-goers what casinos are to gamblers. The uncertainty, the hope, the exhilaration — they’re all a crucial…
Buried treasure
Wexford is to opera-goers what casinos are to gamblers. The uncertainty, the hope, the exhilaration — they’re all a crucial…
High and low
‘Besides feeble writing, there is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it, which Apostolo Zeno and Metastasio had banished…
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