Satyagraha, ENO, 1.1.18 ‘Masterpiece’ – like ‘great’, ‘iconic’, and ‘legendary’ – is a word which should be used sparingly by critics, if at all. But it is absolutel...Read More
Drum children There’s a felicitous double meaning in Kodo, the name of the celebrated Japanese drumming ensemble. Its written characters mean ‘drum child’, but an infinitesimally different...Read More
Liza Ferschtman/Roman Rabinovich, Wigmore Hall, 30.12.17 Roman Rabinovich – credit Balazs Borocz When a work is described as ‘uncommonly difficult for all concerned’, as Gerald Larner...Read More
Simon O’Neill/Christian Gerhaher/London Symphony Orchestra/Simon Rattle: Barbican, 13.12.17 The last major work composed by Richard Strauss, and also by a mile the most beautiful, Metamorphos...Read More
Early Opera Company,Wigmore Hall, 8.12.17 Everyone knows the overture to Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Te Deum, though few have heard of that seventeenth-century French composer. After being pre...Read More
Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, Royal Opera House, 2.12.17 Damiano Michieletto’s production of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci looks like becoming one of Covent...Read More
Semiramide, Royal Opera House, 22.11.17 Rossini’s Semiramide premiered in Venice in 1823, and throughout the nineteenth century it was a popular vehicle for great voices, but in the twentieth...Read More
Anne Page, Royal Festival Hall, 21.11.17 JS Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge – The Art of Fugue – is one of music’s most teasing mysteries. As the culmination of his lifelong experiment in cou...Read More
Singcircle, Barbican, 20.11.17 Three men and three women, each with a microphone, seated in a semi-circle round a table on which a luminous globe had been placed: seven ascending notes, and a s...Read More
Lucia di Lammermoor, Royal Opera House, 8.11.17 Donizetti composed his Scottish tragedy nearly two centuries ago, yet real life has only recently caught up with it. Lucia loves Edgardo, but is ...Read More