The Silver Lake/The Seraglio English Touring Opera Year after year, English Touring Opera’s resourceful director Ed Conway turns up trumps, and this year is no exception. Kurt Weill’s Expressionis...Read More
Orpheus and Eurydice, ENO The most unforgettable stage debut I ever saw was on the evening of 11 September 2001. I was at the Coliseum, New York’s Twin Towers had just collapsed, and Manhattan was b...Read More
Akram Khan’s Giselle, Sadler’s Wells Giselle, which took Paris by storm in 1841 and did the same in another incarnation in St Petersburg fifty years later, has in more recent times gone th...Read More
The Intelligence Park, Linbury Theatre, London The new-music glitterati have gathered, and the claque are in full voice for Nigel Lowery’s new production of Gerald Barry’s The Intelligence Park in...Read More
Ragged Music Festival, Copperfield Road, East London Beating a path through the back streets of Tower Hamlets, I find myself at a stunningly good chamber concert. It begins with Tamsin Waley-Cohen an...Read More
Last Prom, Royal Albert Hall In the ancient past, four years ago, people going to the Last Prom had a fairly settled sense of how to deal with it. Left-wingers could laugh at the programme’s jingois...Read More
Latvia may occupy a large territory, but its population of 1.7 million would fit into a small corner of London, and its road to independence has been long and hard. It endured centuries of Swedish, Po...Read More
Rinaldo, Glyndebourne It’s a great pity that this year’s Glyndebourne offering at the Proms should be its new Magic Flute, because that uneven show’s raison d’etre is sight gag...Read More
Die Zauberflöte, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Lewes In his pre-show sales pitch the French-Canadian director-choreographer Renaud Doucet has announced, with a foot-stamping petulance one more usuall...Read More
The three-string shamisen lute is a brashly assertive instrument, but Japanese composers and performers are now exploring its hitherto unsuspected sonic potential. Honjoh Hidejiro, the leader in this ...Read More