Susan Bickley
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…
One of the greatest operatic experiences of my life: Royal Opera’s Katya Kabanova reviewed
Janacek’s upsetting opera Katya Kabanova, which hasn’t been seen in the UK for some time, turned up in two different…
Excellent but there’s too much larking about: ENO’s Rodelinda reviewed
ENO has revived Richard Jones’s production of Handel’s Rodelinda. It was warmly greeted on its first outing in 2014, though…
The conducting is as potent as Furtwängler’s: Opera North’s Ring reviewed
When I interviewed Richard Farnes in Leeds six years ago about Opera North’s project of performing the complete Ring, he…
WNO reminds us Figaro's a comedy – which is no bad thing
Near the end of Elena Langer’s new opera Figaro Gets a Divorce, as the Almaviva household — now emigrés in…
A devastating Jenufa - if you could hear it
About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and…
ENO's Between Worlds at the Barbican reviewed: too respectful
This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50…
Opera North's Götterdämerung is astounding (nearly)
It seems a very short time since I interviewed Richard Farnes about Opera North’s planned Ring cycle, the dramas to…
