On a clean, largely clear stage, dotted with a few barrels and benches, a tidy vegetable stand to one side and a pub sign, The Four Bears, to the other,…
The more concerts you experience, the more grows your confidence in being able to pick a good one. And this promised to be good, given the exceptional skill of the…
A Christmas concert with a difference – and, thanks to superb playing from Spiritato!, an immensely enjoyable one. Cambridge Early Music offered a sumptuous feast of Italian Baroque music as their Christmas…
As the autumn evenings begin to darken and lengthen, growing chillier and damper, we could all do with a little burst of beauty; and this short programme of three Bach…
Handel’s “little opera” Acis and Galatea suffers from something of an identity crisis: it exists in three versions, and has also been put forward as a candidate for at least three genres:…
This evening of lieder, closing the Cambridge Early Music Festival of the Voice for 2016, included the chance to compare no less than four settings of Goethe’s iconic poem Erlkönig, the…
It seems ironic that the bitter violence of Elizabethan England, a society splintered by religious persecution, should give birth to music of such exceptional poise and serenity as that of…
Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther pitted religion against Romanticism in a battle royal for the soul of young Germany, which Romanticism won: Werther became a cult hero, even a fashion…
Ottone was a great success for Handel in his lifetime, and the ravishing beauty of its music and exciting, dynamic plot shows us why. The consistently high production values of…