Lucia di Lammermoor Royal Opera House, London ★★★★★ 19.4.24 Hot on the heels of Aigul Akhmetshina’s brilliant Carmen for the ROH comes an even more breath-taking incarnation with the ...Read More
Carmen Royal Opera House, London ★★★★★ 5.4.24 Damiano Michieletto is a director dedicated to subverting clichéd classics with provocative surprises, but with his Carmen these surprises are...Read More
Maurizio Pollini, Royal Festival Hall, London Maurizio Pollini was, in his prime, arguably the greatest pianist in the world. In recent years there’s been a falling-off from his once immaculate ...Read More
The Magic Flute Royal Opera House, London There are a few opera productions which never grow stale, they just get better, and so it is with director David McVicar’s version of The Magic Flute. It wa...Read More
Orchestral Music of Afghanistan Afghan soloists plus the Oxford Philharmonic EartH, Hackney [the capitalised H is correct] Qur’an scholars will never agree on the vexed question of whether the enjoy...Read More
Alcina Glyndebourne Festival Opera, West Sussex ★★★★★ In Francesco Micheli’s new production of Handel’s Alcina, the lights go up on a little family whose dysfunctional demeanour sugg...Read More
Madama Butterfly Royal Opera House, London, ★★★★ Nobody could accuse Covent Garden of backwardness in virtue-signalling. They recently announced plans for trigger-warnings when murder, rape, a...Read More
La bohème Glyndebourne Festival Opera, ★★★★ It seems to matter more to Floris Visser that an audience should recognise his personal imprint, than whether he’s served a work as it d...Read More
Orfeo/Cosi fan tutte Garsington Opera, Wormsley The director and designer of Garsington’s new Orfeo – John Caird and Robert Jones – invite their audience to get involved in the ‘immersive arti...Read More
The Handmaid’s Tale Coliseum, London George Orwell’s 1984 did what no other novel had done before: it predicted the shape of the political world to come. The embodiment of its predictions may have...Read More