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
Orchestral Music of Afghanistan Afghan soloists plus the Oxford Philharmonic EartH, Hackney [the capitalised H is correct] Qur’an scholars will never agree on the vexed question of whether the enjoy...Read More
Alcina Glyndebourne Festival Opera, West Sussex ★★★★★ In Francesco Micheli’s new production of Handel’s Alcina, the lights go up on a little family whose dysfunctional demeanour sugg...Read More
Madama Butterfly Royal Opera House, London, ★★★★ Nobody could accuse Covent Garden of backwardness in virtue-signalling. They recently announced plans for trigger-warnings when murder, rape, a...Read More
La bohème Glyndebourne Festival Opera, ★★★★ It seems to matter more to Floris Visser that an audience should recognise his personal imprint, than whether he’s served a work as it d...Read More
Orfeo/Cosi fan tutte Garsington Opera, Wormsley The director and designer of Garsington’s new Orfeo – John Caird and Robert Jones – invite their audience to get involved in the ‘immersive arti...Read More
The Handmaid’s Tale Coliseum, London George Orwell’s 1984 did what no other novel had done before: it predicted the shape of the political world to come. The embodiment of its predictions may have...Read More
Peter Grimes Royal Opera House, London ★★★★★ Michael Church Allan Clayton, John Tomlinson, Bryn Terfel, Jacques Imbrailo, James Gilchrist, John Graham-Hall – and all under the musical dire...Read More
A new concert series (HP Futures); a new venue (St Martin-in-the-Fields has transformed both its subterranean regions and its artistic programme); and a potential new star in the making: what’s not ...Read More
Figure St John Passion St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield In medieval times, miracles were often ascribed to the healing power of the priory at St Bartholomew the Great, London’s oldest parish chu...Read More