| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 24-Oct-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | The cycle concludes: Götterdämmerung at the Royal Opera |
 Monumental in scale and scope, Götterdämmerung is a work to which it is hard to be indifferent. For many, the idea of an evening of fantasy opera lasting nearly seven hours is unimaginable, so uncongenial is the subject material and so great the attention span demanded. For Wagner fans - and Ring fans in particular - it's a riveting theatrical and musical experience, the zenith of opera as an art form. Last night at Covent Garden was my first live Götterdämmerung, spent in the company of around three thousand of those fans.
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| 18-Oct-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Connolly and Terfel stand out in a thought-provoking Walküre at Covent Garden |
 If you've been brought up with the Judaeo-Christian ideal of an all-powerful, all-good God, Norse mythology can come as a bit of a shock. Wotan, the father of the gods, is philandering, deceitful, power-hungry, sentimental, violent and ultimately weak - the gamut of human frailties writ large. Combine all of those with a magic spear and the ability to control the weather and you know that things aren't going to end well.
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| 10-Sep-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Balloons, Lang Lang and Jerusalem: it must be The Last Night of the Proms |
 BBC Chris Christodoulou-1.jpg) The Last Night of the Proms isn't really a concert: it's more like going to the cast party for the Proms season. The choir, orchestra and a fair bit of the audience are in tail coats and brightly coloured evening dresses, there's an abundance of balloons, party poppers and things making rude noises, and the hall is transformed by the waving of literally thousands of flags (between numbers, of course, there's proper hush during the music). Not much point in doing a sober, serious, musicological review, then, so here are a dozen memories, in no particular order.
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| 13-Aug-2011 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 40: Comedy Prom |
 Have you ever been in a chorus of 5,000 people singing the words of an Indian takeaway menu to the tune of Nessun Dorma? Well, courtesy of Kit and the Widow, Susan Bullock and the BBC Comedy Prom, I now have. Of course, the delight of the Proms audience is that not only did everyone know the tune, but a large majority were able to sing it quite competently: it really sounded more than decent. And you'd be amazed at how well you can fit the words "Chicken Tikka Masala" and "Twenty pints of lager" into Puccini's music, not to mention the closing climax of "Vindaloo" to the tune for "vincerò".
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