by Music Editor | Jun 12, 2019 | Music
Barocking By Robert Thicknesse No apologies for writing about a student show: over the past 20 years some of my best evenings have been spent at such performances, and they provide a pretty decent proportion of the staged productions available through the country (at...
by Music Editor | May 9, 2019 | Music
Bad trips down Memory Lane by Robert Thicknesse Opera in Britain can feel pretty peripheral, never more so than when you catch one of these classic productions that do the rounds of mainland Europe. It feels like conversation we are not part of – and, indeed, the idea...
by Music Editor | Mar 3, 2019 | Music
Grace notes by Robert Thicknesse As with nearly all innovations in 19th-century opera, it was Gioachino Rossini who discovered the obvious truth that Queen Elizabeth I was a born coloratura; handy for Gaetano Donizetti, who later put the queen at the heart of two...
by Music Editor | Feb 1, 2019 | Music
Family planning by Robert Thicknesse A lot of supporters of the London Philharmonic Orchestra couldn’t get into last February’s cycle opener (this is a pretty leisurely Ring, culminating in a full cycle in 2021) because of its “gala” billing and concomitantly ruinous...
by Music Editor | Jan 27, 2019 | Music
Hungry hearts by Robert Thicknesse Not many groups can sell out St John’s for a concert of a nearly 300-year-old opera; it says a lot for the vaulting reputation of David Bates’s outfit La Nuova Musica that the place was packed. In what looked a neat gimmick (and...
