Concert Reviews

Ailey with Judith Jamison. Photo: Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, Inc./Smithsonian Institution
The question of how to continue, develop and progress when you lose your founder is particularly pressing for dance groups; the ensembles established by Maurice Béjart, José Limón, Martha Graham and...
Bayreuth Baroque 2023. Photo: Clemens Manser
It may still come as a surprise to some, but musically ‘Bayreuth’ does not necessarily equal ‘Wagner’. Since 2020 the Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival – starting a few days after...
Photo: Chris Lee
The New York Philharmonic kicked off this season with a screening of Steven Spielberg’s 2021 film of West Side Story with live orchestral accompaniment. Leonard Bernstein’s iconic score – which...
Photo: Monika Rittershaus
The Royal Opera House's 2023-24 season opens with this first instalment of Barrie Kosky's new Ring, which will unfold over the next four years. In this same year that London also saw...
The Apothecary, Henry Ross (Mengone), Iuno Connolly (Grilletta)
The Apothecary (1768) was the first opera that Haydn wrote (in Italian as Lo speziale) for the court at Esterháza (inaugurating its opera house). It sets a libretto by the...
Photo: Barbican/Ryan Buchanan
There was a fair amount of blue and yellow worn and displayed for the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra’s last concert of their European tour. With Madame Zelanska now its patron, the...
Verismo (realism or true) opera is often derided for its sensationalism that is not, in fact, very true to real life. However, the high society assassination in Tsarist Russia that is...
Olga Peretyatko and Varduhi Abrahamyan
Adelaide di Borgogna (1817) – rarely seen anywhere beyond the Rossini Opera Festival – here receives its third outing in just seventeen years (previously a 2006 semi-staging, and then a full...
Alexey Tatarintsev and Davide Giangregorio
Aureliano in Palmira (1813) is probably remembered – when at all – for the fact that its Overture was reused by Rossini for The Barber of Seville. Here that now ubiquitous extract...
Eduardo e Cristina (1819) is one of the least well-known of Rossini’s forty or so operas, probably unsurprisingly since it was hastily put together (for Venice while he was otherwise working at...
Photo: Craig Fuller
On first thoughts, Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘spooky’ Ruddigore (1887) seems an odd choice for a summer opera festival. But its presentation is well timed at this point in the year and in...
The Zoo Photo: Curtis Rogers
Three (brief) one Act operas by Sullivan here, but only one of them a collaboration with Gilbert. The Zoo – perhaps the most obscure – was written at the same time as Trial...
Australian Ballet - Jewels. Photo: roh.org.uk
A warm welcome to Australian Ballet in its first visit to Covent Garden in some 35 years.  Now under the direction of the former American star dancer David Hallberg, the ensemble...
LFO 2023 The Fairy Queen Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis
We have become accustomed over the summer (and even before that) to social events being disrupted by Just Stop Oil demonstrations. Polly Graham's production of The Fairy Queen for Longborough amusingly forestalls...
Photo: Julian Guidera
Alim, the eponymous king of Lahore of Massenet’s third opera for Paris (1877) must be a glutton for punishment. Audiences of 19th century opera, in particular, are used to melodramatic stories...
Carlos Acosta and Laura Rodríguez in Mermaid © ROH 2023. Photo: ©Tristram Kenton
Any self-respecting divo must allow himself several farewells at the end of his performing career, so it is unsurprising that, since his retirement from The Royal Ballet in 2015, Carlos...
Photo: Jake Wiltshire
Chemistry and music perhaps seem an odd combination, though fans of Ken Russell will recall that, in his documentary film Elgar, he included an amusing scene about that composer's love of...
Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Richard Hubert Smith
For Glyndebourne's first staging of Handel's Semele (1744), Adele Thomas draws some insightful connections between the cautionary tale of its scenario and her own personal experience. Her upbringing in an industrial part of south Wales inspires the backdrop...
Sweeney Todd
Almost unceasing rainfall during this performance provided, perhaps, an aptly gloomy backdrop for West Green’s production of Sweeney Todd at its theatre on the lake, partly exposed to the elements as the...
Bampton Opera Salieri 'At the Venice Fair' Ensemble
Salieri’s sixth opera, La fiera di Venezia (1772) is set during Venice’s famous Ascension Day ceremony (the Festa della Sensa) rather than at carnival time earlier in the year and is rendered here...
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