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
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