War Requiem, ENO Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem is all bells, children’s choirs, trumpet calls, choral shouts, solo voices leaping out like flames, and angular melodic lines over a ground-bass of ...Read More
Porgy and Bess, ENO Mired in trouble thanks to a series of avoidable but calamitous artistic misjudgements, English National Opera desperately needs a wise hand on the tiller. And if its three-way co-...Read More
Radamisto, Hackney Empire Coming fresh from a clunkily over-heated Ring at Covent Garden, and a deranged travesty of Salome at the Coliseum, it’s sweet relief to encounter English Touring Opera’s ...Read More
Salome, English National Opera ‘We begin in darkness,’ proclaims an essay by Elena Manafi in the programme, ‘a confrontation with the abyss of the feminine.’ Adena Jacobs’s new production of...Read More
Verbier can still spring surprises, even at the venerable age of twenty-five. Marking that anniversary with a gala concert this summer, they corralled more musical celebrities on stage than had ever b...Read More
Paul Bunyan, ENO at Wilton’s As the poet Stephen Spender lamented, Britain never got the great opera which should have resulted from that seemingly dream pairing, Benjamin Britten and WH Auden. The...Read More
Tosca, Grand Theatre, Leeds Post-Weinstein, and following revelations of world-wide corruption in the Catholic church, recent history has played into the hands of any director who wants to give Puccin...Read More
Leeds International Piano Competition, 2018 When the redoubtable Fanny Waterman set up the Leeds Piano Competition in 1963, no one could have predicted its longevity, or the effect it would have on pi...Read More
The Last Prom 2018, Royal Albert Hall The Proms always go out on a high, if you discount the last one whose interest is political rather than musical. In Prom 72, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra...Read More
BBC Young Musician 40th Anniversary, Royal Albert Hall With Brexit threatening to unpick all the things which make life worth living in Britain, it behoves us to count our spoons (as the old saying go...Read More