There’s always a special sense of relaxed occasion at Bampton: each performance, of just one carefully picked and often rare work, feels like the culmination of months of intense preparation,…
Like Glyndebourne’s recent Rinaldo, Longborough’s Magic Flute seems to take shape as a young boy’s daydream, or perhaps the world of his storybook coming to life in his imagination. A sense of…
Buxton International Festival are currently staging Verdi’s first, 1847 Macbeth, written for the Teatro della Pergola, Florence, a theatre similar in size to the Edwardian jewel-box of Buxton’s own Opera House…
July brings a flurry of festivals to the exquisite Georgian spa town: not just the opera, literature, jazz and other music of the Buxton International Festival (soon to celebrate its…
Although it can’t lay claim to the emotional dexterity and acute social awareness of Mozart’s mature works, Lucio Silla is an ambitious piece which demands a great deal of its…
English semi-opera is a strange beast: a story broken up and illustrated by music. Once you settle into it, the shuttling rhythm between music and story is surprisingly and undeniably…
The Arts are steadily moving east in London. Nicholas Hytner is launching his new 900-seat theatre at Tower Bridge this autumn: it’s been 80 years since London theatre received such…
Handel’s Radamisto has a fascinating social history: it was the opera that brought about the beginnings of a reconciliation in the British establishment, previously split by the bitter family tensions…
“You are blight and darkness and sin…” Lost village girl Mary comes home to her beloved Laura after a lifetime of sin in “that devil-town London”, but finds – well…
An old man, hunched and stooping, clambers onto a stage. With an air of exhausted bitterness, he smears white paint onto his face, dons a jester’s horned cap, picks up…