A Midsummer Night’s Dream Garsington Opera, Wormsley The stage on which Netia Jones’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream unfolds boasts a giant circular screen, an astrolabe, two telescopes...Read More
Giulio Cesare Glyndebourne Festival Opera, West Sussex When director David McVicar unveiled his production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne in 2005, the effect was seismic. How dare he turn...Read More
Aci, Galatea e Polyfemo/Brockes Passion London Handel Festival ★★★☆☆ When Handel’s oratorio Aci, Galatea e Polyfemo was premiered to celebrate a ducal wedding in Naples, it was accompanied...Read More
Andrea Chenier Royal Opera House ★★★★ The farewell to life written in 1794 by the French poet Andre Chenier is the most hauntingly dreadful poem ever penned. It was written on the day of his d...Read More
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
Musics can die… I was born in Conwy, a fishing village in north Wales, and many of my earliest memories are of singing. The Second World War was at its darkest hour, and my father was fighting in Fr...Read More
Composer, belle-lettrist, polemicist, novelist, painter, teacher, and failed priest – as well as pianist – the newly-knighted Stephen Hough must sometimes lose track of his multifarious ac...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