| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 23-May-2013 Palais Garnier (Opéra de Paris) | Giulio Cesare in Pelly's museum: Lawrence Zazzo stars in Paris |
 Of the seventeen operas Handel wrote to star the Italian castrato Senesino, Giulio Cesare in Egitto is the most popular, and the one performed most often. It is a dramma per musica filled with ironic hints, and based on power and sex intrigues in ancient Rome. The 38-year-old Handel wrote it in England when his imported Italian-style operas started to fall out of favour.
Read full review... | |
| 17-Aug-2012 Theater an der Wien | Rarely produced Rossini at the Theater an der Wien |
 Written in 1819 and belonging to the opera seria chapter of Rossini’s career, the florid score of La donna del lago doesn’t so much respond to as resist its unabashedly romantic libretto. Within twenty years of the opera’s composition Sir Walter Scott’s Highland epics had spawned a further two dozen operatic spin-offs, but far from venturing onto psychodramatic territory as Donizetti did in Lucia di Lammermoor, Rossini only seldom permits the emotional immediacy of an unadorned vocal line.Read full review... | |
| 25-Aug-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Glyndebourne's Rinaldo comes to the Proms |
 London audiences had never seen anything quite like it. Fireworks, fountains and live sparrows were just a few of the special effects livening up the premiere of Handel's Rinaldo way back in 1711, prompting the Spectator's critic to compare it sniffily to a Punch and Judy show. Fast forward two hundred years, and you might wonder if there's been any progress. The restrictions of the Royal Albert Hall stage, just an open dais set behind the orchestra, rule out anything too adventurous. So the only water was a blue tarpaulin, and the tweeting birds were digitally remastered.Read full review... | |
| 2-Jul-2011 Glyndebourne Opera House | Rinaldo at Glyndebourne |
 To Glyndebourne, for the opening night of Handel's Rinaldo, the first of his operas to be staged in London in 1711, when he was just 26 years old. The opera was a roaring success at the time and the most-repeated of all Handel's operas during his lifetime and yet has been over-shadowed in recent decades by his other great masterpieces, with the result that Richard's Carsen's new production for Glyndebourne is the first in Britain for over 30 years.Read full review... | |
