The Skating Rink, Garsington Opera at Wormsley On paper The Skating Rink had a lot going for it. A distinguished cast, and in Stewart Laing an experienced director-designer. A composer, David Sawer, w...Read More
Highgate Choral Society – a musical community like no other The reading was to take place in a rough-and-ready little theatre under a Waterloo railway arch. The title of the play was Short Memory, a...Read More
Don Giovanni, Royal Opera House, London Some revivals save shows, others only serve to highlight their inherent weaknesses. Richard Jones’s replacement for John Copley’s much-loved Covent Garden B...Read More
Falstaff, Garsington Opera at Wormsley In three weeks’ time the Royal Opera will revive its version of Falstaff which, with Bryn Terfel in the title role, will doubtless sell out. But in Garsingtonâ...Read More
Mamzer Bastard, Hackney Empire, London The term mamzer denotes someone who bears the stigma of having been born out of a forbidden relationship, as defined by Jewish religious law: this new opera by N...Read More
Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne Festival Opera With its plum roles for the castrato Senesino and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni, Handel’s Giulio Cesare enjoyed huge success when it opened in 1724; no oth...Read More
Agrippina, Grange Festival, Hampshire One by one the country house opera companies are getting into gear. Now it’s the Grange Festival – not to be confused with Grange Park Opera, of whose neo-cla...Read More
La Traviata, Opera Holland Park, London While Richard Eyre’s ironclad Traviata draws the crowd year in year out at Covent Garden, English National Opera repeatedly tries and fails to come up with a ...Read More
Die Zauberflöte, Garsington Opera at Wormsley When the lights go up on Netia Jones’s production of Die Zauberflöte, we see that she’s turned the stage into a near-simulacrum of the formal garde...Read More