19th century
The Yeomen of the Guard, National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera CompanyTuesday, 02 August 2016
By the end of Act One of The Yeomen of the Guard there's been a jailbreak, a clandestine marriage, a swapped identity and a cancelled beheading. The chorus sings, halberds are brandished, and a jester jests. Even by Gilbert and Sullivan standards,... Read more... |
Swan Lake, Bolshoi Ballet, Royal Opera HouseSaturday, 30 July 2016
"If you know anything about dance," I was told last night by an aged balletomane at the Royal Opera House, "you know that Russian ballet companies are the best." If this is true then the Bolshoi Ballet, biggest of the Russian companies, in Swan Lake... Read more... |
Béatrice et Bénédict, GlyndebourneThursday, 28 July 2016
Locations count for little in most of Shakespeare's comedies. Only a literal-minded director would, for instance, insist on Messina, Sicily as the setting for Much Ado About Nothing. In Béatrice et Bénédict, on the other hand, Berlioz injects his... Read more... |
Prom 15: Chen, BBCSO, BBCSC, DavisWednesday, 27 July 2016
Programming a concert is a tricky business. Programming an entire Proms season almost unthinkably difficult. But even allowing for the odd evening of leftovers, those artists, anniversaries and concertos that just can’t be fitted in anywhere else,... Read more... |
Swan Lake, Australian Ballet, London ColiseumThursday, 14 July 2016
Graeme Murphy's 2002 Swan Lake for Australian Ballet stitches together plot elements from Swan Lake, Giselle and Lucia di Lammermoor, among other things. No bad thing, that; such mash-ups can work well (see Moulin Rouge), and Matthew Bourne proved... Read more... |
Falstaff, CBSO, Gardner, Symphony Hall BirminghamThursday, 14 July 2016
Edward Gardner gives the downbeat, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra bursts into Verdi’s great opening guffaw. Enter stage left Graham Clark, as Dr Caius. Enter stage right Ambrogio Maestri, as Falstaff. And before a note has been sung,... Read more... |
The Secret Life of Children's Books, BBC FourTuesday, 12 July 2016
This emotive, even emotional half-hour programme focussed on a famous children’s book, The Water-Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, and its author, one of those totally astonishing Victorian polymaths, the Reverend Charles Kingsley (1819-1875).... Read more... |
Leonore, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, Buxton FestivalSunday, 10 July 2016
The first two of the three in-house opera productions in this year’s Buxton Festival could be bracketed under a slogan of "love stories, Jim – but not quite as we know them". Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi is, of course, Romeo and Juliet … sort... Read more... |
Il Trovatore, Royal OperaWednesday, 06 July 2016
That often-repeated truism about Verdi's craziest melodrama, that it needs four of the world's greatest voices, makes no mention of acting ability. Given the top-notch international approach to this kind of opera, impressively fielded by what's... Read more... |
Freud: Genius of the Modern World, BBC FourFriday, 01 July 2016
Recently the television historian Bettany Hughes, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, energetic, enthusiastic and rather astonished, has tramped across the continents on our behalf, making a clutch of hour-long documentary introductions to the individuals... Read more... |
Die Walküre, Opera North, Southbank CentreThursday, 30 June 2016
Enter the human - and superhuman demands for at least four of the singers - in the second, towering instalment of Wagner's Ring cycle. It says so much for Opera North's achievement so far that no one fell in any way short of the sometimes insane... Read more... |
Das Rheingold, Opera North, Southbank CentreWednesday, 29 June 2016
They promised Wagner for everybody at the Southbank Centre, and so far they're delivering. Community events cluster around a livescreening of each Ring instalment in the Clore Ballroom. We privileged few in the Festival Hall wondered how newcomers... Read more... |
