| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 10-May-2013 Barbican Centre: Hall | Not an outrageous start to Nico Muhly's A Scream and an Outrage weekend at the Barbican |
 Nico Muhly describes A Scream and an Outrage, the weekend of events he curated at the Barbican this weekend, as like a dinner party, “a gathering of friends and family new and old; loosely organised”. A wonderfully relaxed vibe was even present on entering the hall for the first concert on Friday: Muhly and a few pals were sat at the side of the stage, quietly and tastefully improvising around a drone. The sense of conviviality which ran throughout the evening was an unusual and welcome thing for a (basically) classical concert. The music, on the other hand, was very uneven.
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| 15-Dec-2012 Barbican Centre: Hall | An enchanting Peer Gynt at the Barbican |
 Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt is one of those works that never gets performed with all the context in which it was composed. The two suites Grieg compiled are often played and well-loved, but Peer Gynt was in fact written as the music for the dramatization of Ibsen’s poem of the same title. The Barbican Centre played host to a performance that presented a more authentic picture, with six actors, three soloists, a mixed chorus and orchestra.Read full review... | |
| 28-Oct-2012 Barbican Centre: Hall | Donizetti's Belisario at the Barbican |
 The second collaboration between Opera Rara and the BBC Symphony Orchestra brought a starry cast to the Barbican Centre on Sunday evening for a revival of Donizetti’s tragic opera Belisario. Written in 1836, immediately after the triumph of Lucia di Lammermoor, it was an instant success following its première at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice and remained in the repertoire for several decades.Read full review... | |
| 5-Sep-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 72: Nixon in China at the Albert Hall |
 Every opera should have at least one of those “wow” moments that lift you out of your seat and have you singing them in your head on the way home. In the case of John Adams' Nixon in China, it comes at the end of Act II, when Chiang Ch'ing struts onto the stage and announces that “I am the wife of Mao Tse-Tung” in a blistering aria filled with aerobatic climbs and swoops and rather Wagnerian major to minor shifts. Kathleen Kim, who sang the role at the Met last year, turned in exactly the sort of show-stopping performance that the number demanded.
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