The most amazing thing about Richard Strauss’s final opera is when and where it was first performed: Munich in 1942, when those who turned up to see it did so despite the risk of being caught in an ...Read More
Paul Lewis, Royal Festival Hall, London The British pianist Paul Lewis doesn’t have a wide repertoire, but he focuses on his chosen composers with white-hot intensity. For a while this meant wall-to...Read More
Lohengrin, Royal Opera House, London Just have faith in our love, says Elsa’s white knight after his arrival in a boat pulled by a swan, making it a condition of matrimony that she should never ask ...Read More
Lessons in Love and Violence, Royal Opera House George Benjamin’s last opera, Written on Skin, has had such glittering international success – notching up more productions per year than Bri...Read More
Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s performance of eighteen Ligeti Etudes at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on May 12 – faster than ever, and negotiating without missing a beat the collapse of several loos...Read More
Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall It isn’t often critics put their money where their mouth is and commission new works, but that’s what Annette Morreau has generously done – in tandem with the Wigmor...Read More
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Royal Opera House Like Thomas Hardy with his condemned Tess – ‘a pure woman’ – Dmitry Shostakovich saw the merchant’s wife Katerina Ismailova, aka his double-...Read More
Chineke! Queen Elizabeth Hall Over the last half-century the outbuildings of the Royal Festival Hall have been threatened with one grandiose makeover after another: people have always been ambi...Read More
The Marriage of Figaro, ENO Fiona Shaw’s production of The Marriage of Figaro didn’t fire on all cylinders when it premiered, and after its second revival there are still problems, some of ...Read More
Macbeth, Royal Opera House Michael Church After two of the most abysmal new productions I have ever seen – From the House of the Dead at Covent Garden, and La traviata at the Coliseum – a revival ...Read More