| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 20-Apr-2013 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | An outstanding Verdi Requiem from the Philharmonia and Gatti |
 Every once in a while, I hear a concert that grips me from the first note and doesn’t let go until the very last. Daniele Gatti and the Philharmonia’s performance of Verdi’s Requiem at the Royal Festival Hall was such a concert.
Read full review... | |
| 11-Feb-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | When Pushkin comes to shove: Kasper Holten's Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House |
 BILL COOPER.jpg) Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is one of the most beautiful scores in the operatic repertoire, and I don’t blame people who come to it looking forward to immersing themselves in the warm bath of the familiar story and music. For many of the audience – and, it has to be said, critics – Kasper Holten’s deconstructed Onegin clearly felt as if nanny had taken teddy away and left a book on German Expressionist cinema in its place.
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| 29-Dec-2012 Staatsoper | Bechtolf's Ariadne auf Naxos at the Vienna Staatsoper |
 A new production of Ariadne auf Naxos is a major draw in itself, but a queue for standing room whose end is on the other side of the opera house is news even in Vienna, especially when the performance is not the première, but the fourth in a run of five and also the one that Franz Welser-Möst left to Jeffrey Tate, who has conducted the piece to positive reviews before. But with no rehearsals and a pit full of substitutes, he found himself unfairly challenged by scratchy violins, impure brass and winds, and botched entries from all directions.Read full review... | |
| 31-Mar-2012 National Theatre | Otello in Munich: Everything Opera Should Be |
 Wilfried Hösl IMG_6954.jpg) Otello is usually considered to be Verdi’s most mature opera. It was one of the last ones he wrote, the result of a plot by his publisher Riccordi and the conductor Franco Faccio to draw him out of early retirement. The result is a work which combines all the aspects of Verdi’s earlier operatic style with Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. Unlike the operas up to Aida, Otello does away with the strict “aria-recitative” division, moving towards the more fluid style of Wagner.Read full review... | |
