| Date and venue | Title |
|---|---|
| 14-Jun-2013 The London Coliseum | John Graham-Hall outstanding in ENO's Death in Venice |
 Premièred in 1973, Death in Venice was Britten’s last opera and therefore his last chance to create a big starring role for his lifelong partner Peter Pears. The role of Gustav von Aschenbach, the ageing writer struck by a fatal infatuation for a beautiful young boy, is enormous, requiring the tenor to be on stage and fully involved for virtually the whole opera, running at nearly two and a half hours.Read full review... | |
| 10-Jun-2013 Garsington Opera | Maometto Secondo triumphantly captures Garsington |
 A great number of works from the bel canto era and before have not found their way into the current operatic repertoire, generally for good reason: many are flawed, dated or just not particularly distinguished. Garsington Opera have just proved to us that Rossini’s Maometto Secondo is not one of those. This is its first ever fully staged production in the United Kingdom; I’m certain it’s going to be the first of many.
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| 7-Jun-2013 Holland Park Theatre | A game of two halves: Cav and Pag at Opera Holland Park |
 As I left Holland Park after last night’s Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, I found myself wondering what they’d put in the orchestra’s cups of tea at the interval. Or, perhaps, what was it that conductor Stuart Stratford said to them. Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen an opera performance that was (to borrow a phrase from football) such a game of two halves: a lacklustre Cavalleria followed by a thoroughly entertaining Pagliacci.
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| 2-Jun-2013 Southbank Centre: Queen Elizabeth Hall | Unjust neglect? Chelsea Opera Group makes a good case for Verdi's Alzira |
 Alzira, Verdi’s eighth opera, is something of a discarded child within his canon, not least because of Verdi’s own dismissal of it as “proprio brutta” (really ugly) after it was poorly received both in Naples and Rome. Perhaps Verdi was stung by a blot on an otherwise successful career: on the basis of last night’s concert performance by Chelsea Opera Group, the score has plenty to commend it.
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| 31-May-2013 Grange Park Opera, Northington | Bel canto pleasures: I Puritani at Grange Park |
 With programming in the major opera houses dominated by Verdi and Wagner, bel canto fans have had a slightly thin time of it this year (Covent Garden’s La donna del lago is an exception). But others are filling some of the gaps, with Rossini’s Maometto II coming up at Garsington and Stephen Langridge’s production of Bellini’s I Puritani, which opened at Grange Park last night. The opera is set during the English Civil War in Plymouth, Scotland (Bellini and his librettist Carlo Pepoli had a loose grasp on the geography of Britain).
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| 11-May-2013 The London Coliseum | Bring your mental body armour: Wozzeck at ENO |
 Military service brutalises. If you’re in any doubt about this, Berg’s short opera Wozzeck should dispel them, and particularly so in Carrie Cracknell’s new production for ENO. The fragmentary play on which Wozzeck is based, by Georg Büchner, originated in a true story of a soldier in the Napoleonic wars and was edited and published after the Franco-Prussian war; Berg wrote the opera in the aftermath of World War I; Cracknell moves it to the British military of today. It could be in any place at any time.
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| 29-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | Flashes of brilliance in the Met's Siegfried |
 Each of Wagner's Ring Cycle operas offers conductor and performers a continual stream of opportunities for "wow" moments. There are moments of humour, bars of intense power in the music, crises in the drama or passages of intense vocal lyricism - there are so many possibilities that it's impossible for any one performance to capture them all. One way of evaluating a Ring Cycle opera is to consider how many of these fleeting instances were seized upon by orchestra and cast with enough impact to make a lasting impression in your memory.
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| 28-Apr-2013 The Juilliard School: Peter Jay Sharp Theater | America's young talent on show at the Juilliard's Cunning Little Vixen |
 Generally, opera doesn’t give old age much of a look-in, but the closing scene of Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen, written in Janáček’s old age, is an exception, as the Forester muses on the passing of time and the renewing cycle of life. In today’s Juilliard School production, Aubrey Allicock gave us the most touching and thoughtful of renderings. Through the whole opera, his voice was a delight to listen to: gloriously full, rich and smooth, with the power to cut through the orchestra and fill the Juilliard’s 900-seater Peter Jay Sharp Theater.Read full review... | |
| 26-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | Die Walküre at the Met |
 You can summarise the plot of Die Walküre in three sentences: Siegmund and Sieglinde fall in love and elope; Fricka coerces Wotan into killing Siegmund; Wotan punishes Brünnhilde for trying to save him. But within that simple framework lies a vast gamut of human distress, striving, redemption - and, make no mistake, Wotan may be notionally a god, but Norse gods are made in man’s image: extensions of humanity rather than abstract spirits.
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| 25-Apr-2013 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | The Met's Ring Cycle begins with an impressive Das Rheingold |
 Quite simply, it’s the largest scale event in all of opera. With 18 hours of music in a 3,800 seat house, Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met is a giant, lavish undertaking – all starting with that famous E flat chord: starting from the quietest of pianissimo double bass notes and building for nearly four minutes before it explodes into the melody of the Rhinemaidens.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 6-Apr-2013 Grosvenor Chapel, Mayfair | Hasse's Lucio Papirio Dittatore revived at London Handel Festival |
 Had you been travelling, in the mid 18th century, around the crowned courts of middle Europe, there would have been little debate as to who was the most celebrated opera composer and ensemble: Johann Adolph Hasse and his company at the Saxon court of Dresden. Tastes changed, of course, and baroque opera seria died out, and Hasse has not formed part of its recent revival, focused as it is on the works of Handel and Rameau.Read full review... | |
| 30-Mar-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | The chorus takes the honours in the Royal Opera's Nabucco |
 “Fly, my thoughts, on gilded wings; fly to rest on hills and mounts.” It’s no understatement to say that Va, pensiero, the Act 3 chorus of the Hebrew slaves in Nabucco, catapulted Giuseppe Verdi to lasting fame. It remains one of the biggest moments in any opera, and the Royal Opera Chorus performed it superbly last night. It was a sort of collective messa di voce, swelling from gentle yearning to the full-voiced nostalgia in the third verse modulation, dying back to an almost whispered ending.
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| 21-Mar-2013 Opéra Bastille | A German in Paris: Siegfried at the Opéra Bastille |
 For those who view Wagner’s Ring Cycle in symphonic terms, Siegfried is often described as the third movement Scherzo: an episode of comedy in between the existential musings of Die Walküre and the action-packed, apocalyptic Götterdämerung. Last night’s performance at the Opéra Bastille in Paris gave us plenty of high comedy and much more besides.
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| 18-Mar-2013 Bloomsbury Theatre | Lombards but no crusade: Verdi's I Lombardi at UCOpera |
 UCOpera, the opera company of University College London, has a history of putting on lesser known Verdi works: amongst many others, they have staged the British premières of Alzira, Oberto and the original 1847 version of Macbeth. This year, they've turned their attention to I Lombardi alla prima crociata ("The Lombards at the first crusade"), Verdi's follow-up to his smash hit Nabucco, which was as successful as Nabucco in its early years, although it has since faded from the repertoire.
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| 11-Mar-2013 Royal Academy of Music, Sir Jack Lyons Theatre | An absorbing Eugene Onegin at Royal Academy Opera |
 For an opera school production, it's a good idea to choose a classic: something that will focus the audience on the quality of the singers and orchestra rather than on innovation in the piece or programming. It's better still if you can find a classic that was originally composed with a conservatoire performance in mind, and this is what Royal Academy Opera have chosen this term, in the shape of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, first performed in 1879 by students at the Moscow Conservatoire.
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| 8-Mar-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | New opera, ancient tales: George Benjamin's Written on skin at the Royal Opera |
 21st century opera is a broad church. There aren’t many of us, I suppose, who are intimately familiar with the biographical accounts of the lives of 13th century troubadours, popular at the time in Spain and south west France. But Martin Crimp and George Benjamin, librettist and composer of Written on skin, aren’t exactly run of the mill people.
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| 2-Mar-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | All round excellence in the Royal Opera's Tosca |
 Few operas are as specific in time and place as Puccini's Tosca: the date is 17th June, 1800, shortly after the battle of Marengo (in which Napoleon Bonaparte wrested control of Northern Italy from Austria), while each of the three acts is located in a specific landmark in Rome: the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle, the Palazzo Farnese and the Castel Sant'Angelo. But few are as universal in theme: the brutal abuse of power in a police state, where a single weakness can cost your life and those of your loved ones.
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| 25-Feb-2013 The London Coliseum | Outstanding Rossini singing from Lucy Crowe in ENO's Barber of Seville |
 Scott Rylanderx.jpg) In the celebratedly short time in which Rossini wrote The Barber of Seville, he got into a time capsule and took a short trip to twenty-first century London; on his return to 1816 Rome, he wrote the part of Rosina for Lucy Crowe's voice. Or at least, that's what it felt like at ENO last night, as Crowe turned in a performance which outstrips my ability to find superlatives.
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| 9-Feb-2013 Église de Saanen, Saanen | Sommets Musicaux closing concert: Kammerorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunk with Maximilian Hornung |
 The programme for the closing concert of Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad had a familiar form: a late twentieth century concerto sandwiched between two classical pieces – a sure sign, if ever there was one, of a “difficult” work sugar-coated by material more palatable to a mainstream audience. But signs can be misleading, extremely so in this case. Georgian composer Vaja Azarashvili’s 1970 Concerto for cello and chamber orchestra is a thoroughly romantic piece – easily accessible and of haunting, lyrical beauty.
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| 9-Feb-2013 Kapelle Gstaad | Cello fireworks from Edgar Moreau in Gstaad |
 One always comes to a young musicians' concert with a slight hope that this will be that special day when you hear a performer who you are absolutely sure will be a star of the future. That hope only comes to fruition on a small number of occasions: this concert was one of them. I'm willing to take bets that nineteen year old Parisian cellist Edgar Moreau is going to have a glittering career.
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| 8-Feb-2013 Église de Saanen, Saanen | Opera seria brought to life by Zazzo and the Geneva Chamber Orchestra |
 Question: how do you demonstrate to a sceptical audience that baroque opera seria doesn’t have to be boring? To answer this, the organisers of Sommets Musicaux and David Greilsammer, conductor of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra came up with a programme consisting of four Handel arias interspersed with orchestral passages from French baroque opera, these chosen for their variety and dance-based character.
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| 8-Feb-2013 Kapelle Gstaad | Some memorable moments in a mixed cello concert |
 Reviewing concerts by young performers can be a tricky business, particularly when the material is highly varied and the way it is played even more so. Whenever I formed an opinion about the cello playing of Pablo Ferrández in today’s concert in Gstaad Chapel, I found myself contradicting it in the following piece. So here are some of the highlights of a concert by a young performer who has great promise but is some way off the finished article.
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| 7-Feb-2013 Église de Saanen, Saanen | Exemplary Prokofiev and extraordinary Beethoven from Elisabeth Leonskaja |
 There are some concerts where everything comes together, where the music is perfectly suited to the performers, and the hall is perfectly suited to their playing style. Last night’s concert at Saanen Church, in which Elisabeth Leonskaja joined Wojciech Rajski and his Polish Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra to play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4, was just such an occasion.
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| 7-Feb-2013 Kapelle Gstaad | Cello music romantic and modern in Gstaad |
| One of the more attractive features of the Sommets Musicaux festival is the series of concerts in Gstaad chapel, each given by a young musician who has been spending the week attending classes, with a mentor – in this case, Mario Brunello – and each including a world première written by the festival’s composer in residence – this year, it’s the turn of Nicolas Bacri.
This year focuses on the cello, and today’s concert featured Swiss cellist Sayaka Selina playing a mixed programme of Romantic and modern works, accompanied by German pianist Mathis Bereuter.
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| 6-Feb-2013 Église de Rougemont | Alexei Volodin at Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad |
 The fact that Schubert’s four D.899 piano pieces are called “Impromptus” can seem incongruous: after all, they are formally structured pieces which are carefully scored with great subtlety, and performing them has little to do with spur-of-the-moment improvisation. Still, they are less architectural constructions than many, seeming more to start with a theme and then take it for a walk to see where it goes, always being careful, after various highways and byways, to come back to the beginning.
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| 31-Jan-2013 Barbican Centre: Hall | Fevered but not all that Balkan? Crossover at the Barbican with the LSO and the Theodosii Spassov Trio |
 Kristjan Järvi cuts quite a dash on the podium, youthful, exuberant and full of energy, all adjectives that could be applied to the music in last night's Barbican crossover gig by the LSO, entitled "Balkan Fever". The concert was in two halves, linked by an over-arching theme of folk- and gypsy-inspired music, the first half being straight classical (Kodaly and Enescu), while the second was headlined by the Theodosii Spassov Trio. Spassov is a Bulgarian player of the kraval (an end-blown flute); he is accompanied by two guitarists.
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| 19-Jan-2013 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Where the noise began: Richard Strauss at the Royal Festival Hall |
 A pub quiz question for you, dear reader: with which work did 20th century music begin? The rest is noise, Alex Ross's history of 20th century music, opens with Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salome, focusing particularly on its final bars. As Princess Salome is crushed under the shields of King Herod's guard, the music turns to what Ross describes as "...a tumult... a howl... a shriek... In effect, the opera ends with eight bars of noise". Last night's all-Strauss concert, which closed with the Dance of the Seven Veils and the last scene from Salome marked the start of a year-long programme of events dedicated to telling the story of 20th century music, inspired by and named after Ross's book.
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| 17-Jan-2013 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Birtwistle's Minotaur at Covent Garden: Impressive but sterile |
 Revivals of 21st century operas on the stages of major houses are rarer than hens' teeth, so the Royal Opera were making a strong statement when they announced the revival of Harrison Birtwistle's 2008 The Minotaur, with the original director and much of the original cast.
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| 21-Dec-2012 La Scala | A dream cast united in La Scala's Lohengrin |
 The first opera of the season at La Scala is an event of huge cultural significance in Italy, so it raised some hackles when, for Giuseppe Verdi’s centenary year, the management passed over Verdi in favour of Wagner’s Lohengrin. But even Italians disappointed by the insult to their culture found it impossible to quarrel with the quality of the singing talent on show.Read full review... | |
| 8-Dec-2012 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | Álvarez and Hvorostovsky outstanding in the Met's Un ballo in maschera |
 Verdi experts regularly name Un ballo in maschera to be one of his finest works. In spite of this, it’s never reached the heights of popularity of La Traviata or Rigoletto, so a new production by an acclaimed director for a major opera house is a notable event. We watched David Alden’s New York Ballo from the comfort of a London cinema under the Met’s Live in HD series.
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| 6-Dec-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | 120 years on: Meyerbeer's Robert le diable returns to Covent Garden |
 COOPER2.jpg) Robert le diable’s 1831 opening was perhaps the most successful opera première of all time. Meyerbeer was lauded by luminaries like Chopin, Dumas, Balzac and Heinrich Heine, the opera was played in 69 cities in its first two years and spawned an entire genre of French Grand Opera. Why, then, has it fallen from grace, last night’s Covent Garden production being the first since 1890?
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| 21-Nov-2012 The London Coliseum | Danger, sleaze, passion: Carmen re-imagined at ENO |
 Alastair Muir-sm.jpg) Carmen has always been in my head as a “pretty” opera: lovely tunes, colourful setting, exotically alluring gypsy brushing up against hunky bullfighter and handsome soldier - not exactly French Grand Opera, perhaps, but a far cry from gritty verismo. Calixto Bieito changed all that last night, with a production for ENO that strips the story down to its bare essentials, and left me thrilled beyond measure.
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| 19-Nov-2012 Royal Academy of Music, Sir Jack Lyons Theatre | Haydn's La vera costanza at Royal Academy Opera |
 One of the consistent joys of seeing a performance by the Royal Academy of Music's opera school is that they bring in world class conductors. At last night's La vera costanza, the orchestra, conducted by Trevor Pinnock, was exceptional. The whole evening's music was played with sprightly elegance, lightness of touch and perfectly weighted changes of pace and strength as the music shifted moods between comedy, pathos and storm-laden drama. Haydn's sense of humour came through especially clearly: the music is infused with a sense of joy and fun.
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| 13-Nov-2012 Royal Opera House, Covent Garden | Donizetti's elixir is still a winning formula at Covent Garden |
 ASHMORE-bt.jpg) Take one hapless but lovable hero, one capricious but ultimately vulnerable heroine, a doctor and an army officer straight out of commedia dell’arte, a couple of basso buffo patter songs, at least one memorable romantic ballad, and stir the lot into a good lashing of boisterous Italian music with a sprinkling of furtive tears. Donizetti’s formula for L’Elisir d’Amore may not have made all the girls fall at his feet, it did bring him money and enduring fame beyond even the wildest predictions that could have been made by the quack Dr. Dulcamara.
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| 10-Nov-2012 Upstairs at the Gatehouse | Monteverdi's L'Orfeo at Hampstead Garden Opera |
 There’s something pretty special about going to see one of the very first operas ever written. It’s particularly special if you love the rhythms of renaissance dance music, the harmonies of polyphonic choral music and if, as I am, you are an admirer of Claudio Monteverdi’s vocal writing: it’s quite plausible to argue that he remains unmatched in his ability to spin a beautiful vocal thread and weave it around the emotions of a text.
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| 1-Nov-2012 Guildhall School Theatre | Martinů has the last laugh at the Guildhall |
 Opera school productions are designed to provide experience for their students and showcase their talents to an audience sprinkled with casting directors. Clearly, the Guildhall School have decided to extract maximum value from their current production by staging not one opera but three, with different casts and even different orchestral musicians. For added interest, they have chosen three short works that were highly successful in their day but have faded from the current repertoire: two romantic operas by Massenet, followed by a surreal 20th century comedy by Martinů.
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| 27-Oct-2012 Lincoln Center: Metropolitan Opera House | The Met's Otello in the cinema |
 The devil, they say, has all the best lines. In yesterday's performance of Verdi's Otello at the Met, the villain was simply sensational. Falk Struckmann's delivery of Jago's Credo in un Dio crudel (“I believe in a cruel God”) was a masterpiece of nihilism, combining power and richness of voice with a tone of pure, matter of fact evil. Throughout the opera, Struckmann avoided overacting: he simply let Boito's and Shakespeare's words do the talking, giving them weight and character through his singing voice.
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| 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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| 17-Oct-2012 Southbank Centre: Royal Festival Hall | Beethoven, Vine and Shostakovich from Sinaisky and the LPO |
 At first sight, last night’s London Philharmonic Orchestra concert at the Royal Festival Hall was a typical piece of programming: a well known, relatively undemanding opener, a big symphony to close, and a première of a newly written work sandwiched carefully in between. But this programme had more coherence than met the eye, and Carl Vine’s Second Piano Concerto proved a thoroughly entertaining sandwich filler.
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| 5-Oct-2012 Royal Opera House: Linbury Studio Theatre | Brilliant but flawed: English Touring Opera's The Emperor of Atlantis |
 When Emperor Überall decrees an all-pervasive war that will result in the death of his whole population, Death takes umbrage at the fact that his job is being usurped and, in the mother of all demarcation disputes, goes on strike. Death, it turns out, is something of a stickler for procedure, refusing to take away his friend the Harlequin because his name isn’t on the list yet; he and Harlequin coolly observe proceedings as soldiers are unable to kill each other, eventually forcing the Emperor to confront the nature of his regime and of war itself.
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| 2-Oct-2012 Barbican Centre: Hall | Elina Garanča thrills in concert at the Barbican |
 As crowd-pulling operatic divas go, most of the attention goes to the sopranos. But a select number of mezzos have the same kind of following, and Latvia's Elina Garanča is high on that list. There are just a few roles where the mezzo is the main character of the opera (many of the others are "witches and bitches", as Garanča puts it), and the big one of those is Carmen.Read full review... | |
| 1-Oct-2012 The London Coliseum | ENO's Julius Caesar in Egypt |
 The full name of Handel's opera is Giulio Cesare in Egitto: it depicts a historically loose version of Caesar's sojourn in Alexandria, during which Pompey is murdered, Ptolemy is killed in battle and Cleopatra is installed as Queen. In Michael Keegan-Dolan's new production for ENO, we know we're in Egypt straight away because when we enter the auditorium, we see a giant crocodile in the middle of an otherwise plain stage (apart from the dead giraffe in the corner, of which more later).Read full review... | |
| 17-Sep-2012 The London Coliseum | Surrealism in the opera house: Martinů's Julietta at ENO |
 For a Parisian, the accordion is the musical instrument most redolent of memories and dreams. So for Bohuslav Martinů's surrealist opera Julietta, written in Paris and infused with a discombobulating jumble of memories and dreams, Antony McDonald's sets were masterpieces: in each of three acts, the stage is dominated by a giant accordion which is more or less the size of the whole stage.Read full review... | |
| 6-Sep-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 73: Perahia, Haitink and the Vienna Philharmonic |
 Beethoven's music in general, and the Fourth Piano Concerto in particular, is on the cusp between the Classical and the Romantic: the Classical forms are stretched to their limit but left unbroken, while Beethoven provides plenty of opportunity for a Romantically-minded interpreter to charge off in any number of wild directions. In the first half of last night's Prom, Murray Perahia and the Vienna Philharmonic gave us a performance very much towards the Classical end of the spectrum, with a sound fascinatingly different from many Beethoven interpretations.
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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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| 1-Sep-2012 Cadogan Hall | Passion and transfiguration from the Australian Chamber Orchestra |
.jpg) Previously, for me, the term “Chamber Orchestra” has meant an ordinary orchestra, only smaller: apart from the sound being somewhat thinned out and consequently cleaner, I don't expect a fundamentally different experience. Or, didn't, that is, until last night at Cadogan Hall, where I saw the Australian Chamber Orchestra for the first time.Read full review... | |
| 31-Aug-2012 Royal Albert Hall | Prom 65: Guy Barker and Martin Taylor's Spirit of Django |
 Friday's Late Night Prom was a bold venture into crossover. On the left and centre of the stage was a fully loaded symphony orchestra (the Britten Sinfonia); on the right, a jazz big band (the Guy Barker Jazz Orchestra); in front of them, virtuoso jazz guitarist Martin Taylor and his Spirit of Django ensemble; on the podium, conducting the whole lot, was Barker himself.Read full review... | |
