| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 11-Mar-2013 Royal College of Music: Britten Theatre | London Handel Festival opens with a tongue-in-cheek Imeneo at the RCM |
 Imeneo (1740), Handel’s penultimate opera, is atypical on several fronts. It’s relatively short by Handel’s standards (three acts, under two hours of music); the plot is thin, but not as absurd or complicated as those of some of his other operas (there are no disguises, for example); the title role is composed for a bass; and the opera has a chorus which participates in the plot, rather than just singing at the end.Read full review... | |
| 2-Mar-2013 Oslo Opera House, Main Stage | Easter in Italy: Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci at the Norwegian National Opera |
 Nothing says “Happy Easter” like a bit of alcohol-fuelled murder on the church steps, right? With their new double bill of Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, the Norwegian National Opera certainly seems to think so!
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| 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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| 8-Mar-2012 Dorothy Chandler Pavilion | Britten's Albert Herring: A sardonic delight at LA Opera |
 After the success of Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia, Britten and director/librettist Eric Crozier discussed future operatic projects. The composer wanted his next opera to be a comedy and insisted that it be set in England. When Crozier suggested adapting Guy de Maupassant’s La Rosier de Madame Husson, Britten knew he was on to something good. Indeed, it was an ideal choice.
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