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 Lucien Jenkins | Jun 9, 2019 | Music
In recent years opera has started to pick its topics out of the newspapers, finding material in the everyday in a way Puccini would have approved. Now WNO has turned to Jake Heggie’s fact-based tale, premiered in 2000, of a nun going to meet a death-row prisoner...
by Tom Sutcliffe | May 28, 2019 | Music
Byway to hell All Berlioz’s few operas are highly original in structure and intention – a characteristic encouraged by this brilliant composer’s obsession with Shakespeare as a model alien in French culture. But his Damnation de Faust is not an opera, more like...
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 Amanda Holloway | May 1, 2019 | Awards, Music
At the end of a thrilling performance of her new song cycle, Kate Whitley received the 2018 Critics’ Circle Award for Emerging Talent: Composer. Her Six Charlotte Mew Settings were sung by two outstanding British artists, bass Matthew Rose and soprano Katherine...
by Tom Sutcliffe | Apr 25, 2019 | Music
Billy Budd is Britten’s second opera for his beloved tenor partner, and the Royal Opera got one thing right for this somewhat dubious new production by Deborah Warner: namely Toby Spence in Peter Pears’s role, Edward Fairfax Vere, captain of HMS Indomitable....
