| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 16-Apr-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Die Zauberflöte at Covent Garden |
 How, I wonder, is it best for an opera company to treat a revival of a well-aired, well-liked, decent but not particularly radical production of a top ten opera? This was what the Royal Opera had to contend with in this season’s revival of David McVicar’s 2003 setting of Die Zauberflöte: many in the audience will have known every note of the opera, and several will have been thoroughly familiar with the production.
Read full review... | |
| 5-Mar-2013 Birmingham Hippodrome | David Pountney and Welsh National Opera's superb new Lulu in Birmingham |
 photo credit Clive Barda 4067.jpg) Is it possible for us to feel a shred of sympathy for Lulu, surely one of opera’s most notorious anti-heroines, even when she meets her grizzly demise at the coda of Berg’s eponymous masterwork? I think it speaks volumes about the astonishing quality of soprano Marie Arnet’s performance that my answer to this question after seeing Welsh National Opera’s new production of Lulu is a most definite “no”.
Read full review... | |
| 13-Nov-2012 Walt Disney Concert Hall | Salonen and the Philharmonia deliver a razor-sharp Wozzeck at Disney Hall |
 Those closing bars of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, tottering away into nothingness, is one of the great nexus points in musical history. Drawing upon the coda of Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, where the Russian’s ballet staggers in similar fashion to a stop, it was the signal moment in Berg’s opera that demonstrated, contrary to popular prejudice, the Austrian composer’s openness (as well as that of his Second Viennese School colleagues) to other composers and musics that ran counter to his own melos.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... | |
