Alexandra Coghlan

alexandra.coghlan

Bio: Alexandra is the classical music critic of the New Statesman, and has written on arts for The Times, The Independent, The Guardian, Prospect, Gramophone, Opera Now, The Oxford Times and The Monthly. She was formerly Performing Arts Editor at Time Out, Sydney. She writes about classical music, theatre and film for theartsdesk.

Articles by Alexandra Coghlan

L'Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato, St John's Smith Square

Saturday, 11 May 2013

The return of the Lufthansa Festival of Baroque Music to London each year always heralds the beginning of summer. Granted this beginning is usually damp and decidedly chilly, but there’s a...

Mahan Esfahani, Wigmore Hall/Joseph Reuben, Petersham House

Monday, 06 May 2013

Old instruments have found young champions this week in two very different concerts and contexts. In the Wigmore Hall, Mahan Esfahani continued his persuasive rehabilitation of the harpsichord,...

The Tempest, Shakespeare's Globe

Friday, 03 May 2013

A thunder sheet booms, a didgeridoo hums distantly, a model ship rears and pitches its way forward through the waves of groundlings and suddenly we find ourselves washed up on the shores of the Globe...

La bohème, English National Opera

Tuesday, 30 April 2013

I’m not one to get misty-eyed over La bohème (unless it be a red mist of rage), but this second revival of Jonathan Miller’s production at English National Opera brought me closer than any yet to...

Juan Diego Flórez and friends, Barbican Hall

Monday, 22 April 2013

It takes a certain kind of artist to book American mezzo-extraordinaire Joyce DiDonato as a supporting act. It’s a risk. Even if you happen to be Juan Diego Flórez. But it’s one that actually paid...

The Breadwinner, Orange Tree Theatre

Sunday, 21 April 2013

Although overwhelmingly remembered now as a novelist, Somerset Maugham was best known during his lifetime as a playwright. “England’s Dramatist”, as the newspapers christened him, produced more than...

theartsdesk in Lyons: A contemporary opera house taking a bold approach

Sunday, 14 April 2013

“There are three rivers in Lyons: the Rhône, the Saône and the Beaujolais.” Thus goes the popular saying – as apt today for France’s gastronomic and wine-quaffing capital as it was back in the 15th...

Sunken Garden, English National Opera, Barbican Theatre

Saturday, 13 April 2013

Sunken Garden is described officially as a “film opera”. Two words. Emphatically unhyphenated. No attempt made to neologise or fashion some third-way genre terminology. It’s not a symbol that bodes...

Leif Ove Andsnes, Wigmore Hall

Wednesday, 10 April 2013

If ever there was such a thing as a safe pair of pianistic hands then they would belong to Norway’s Leif Ove Andsnes. There’s a cool, patrician control to everything he does that speaks to thorough...

theartsdesk Q&A: Conductor Sir John Eliot Gardiner

Saturday, 30 March 2013

It’s only fitting that Sir John Eliot Gardiner should be celebrating his 70th birthday with a concert in the Royal Albert Hall. That it should be a nine-hour marathon of a concert is not only fitting...

Trelawny of the Wells, Donmar Warehouse

Wednesday, 27 February 2013

His recent film adaptation of Anna Karenina framed the action of Tolstoy’s novel in a theatre, so it seems only natural that director Joe Wright should follow it up with a return to the stage himself...

John Cage Lecture on Nothing, Barbican Theatre

Tuesday, 26 February 2013

“I have nothing to say, and I am saying it. And that is poetry.” Originally delivered by John Cage at an artists’ club in New York in 1949, the composer’s Lecture On Nothing went on to become a core...

Ohlsson, LPO, Alsop, Royal Festival Hall

Saturday, 23 February 2013

The Southbank Centre’s The Rest is Noise Festival has reached the American leg of its year-long tour through 20th century music, and with it safe musical ground. In the second of three concerts...

Medea, English National Opera

Saturday, 16 February 2013

How do you solve a problem like Medea? Euripides’ baby-killing, hell-invoking sorceress is one of literature’s most terrifying and unfathomable creations – a woman capable of murdering her own...

Pires, LSO, Haitink, Barbican Hall

Wednesday, 13 February 2013

It’s not that Bernard Haitink’s tempos are universally slow, it’s just that they often feel that way. When it works the music can be magisterial, immense, but when it doesn’t you find yourself...

Spades, Roundhouse

Tuesday, 12 February 2013

You don’t so much watch a Robert Lepage show as surrender to it, and his latest project sees Canada’s most innovative theatre-maker in full assault. It’s hard to think of another director whose...