Concert Reviews

Ailey with Judith Jamison. Photo: Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation, Inc./Smithsonian Institution
Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater
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
Bayreuth Baroque Opera Festival 2023 – Händel’s Flavio
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
New York Philharmonic – David Newman conducts Leonard Bernstein’s score to a Live Screening of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story
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
Royal Opera House – Wagner’s Das Rheingold – with Christopher Maltman, Christopher Purves & Sean Panikkar; directed by Barrie Kosky; conducted by Antonio Pappano
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)
Bampton Classical Opera – Haydn’s The Apothecary
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
Keri-Lynn Wilson conducts the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra, with violinist Valeriy Sokolov
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...
If Opera 2023 – Giordano’s Fedora
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
Rossini Opera Festival 2023 – Adelaide di Borgogna – with Olga Peretyatko, Varduhi Abrahamyan & Riccardo Fassi; directed by Arnaud Bernard; conducted by Francesco Lanzillotta
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
Rossini Opera Festival 2023 – Aureliano in Palmira – with Alexey Tatarintsev, Sara Blanch & Raffaelle Lupinacci; directed by Mario Martone; conducted by George Petrou
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...
Rossini Opera Festival 2023 – Eduardo e Cristina – with Anastasia Bartoli, Daniela Barcellona & Enea Scala; directed by Stefano Poda; conducted by Jader Bignamini
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
Opera Holland Park 2023 – Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore – with Matthew Kellet, David Webb & Llio Evans; directed by John Savournin; conducted by David Eaton
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
The International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival – Arthur Sullivan Triple Bill – Cox and Box, Trial by Jury, The Zoo
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
Jewels – George Balanchine’s glittering triptych of abstract ballets
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
Longborough Festival 2023 – Purcell’s The Fairy Queen – Lars Fischer, Rachel Speirs, Luke Horner & Peter Edge; directed by Polly Graham; conducted by Harry Sever & Naomi Burrell
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
Dorset Opera Festival 2023 – Massenet’s Le roi de Lahore – Amar Muchhala, Seljan Nasibli & Michael Anthony McGee; directed by Ella Marchment; conducted by Jeremy Carnall
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
Carlos at 50
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
Opera Holland Park 2023 – Jonathan Dove’s Itch – with Adam Temple-Smith, Natasha Agarwal, Rebecca Bottone & James Laing; directed by Stephen Barlow; conducted by Jessica Cottis
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
Glyndebourne Festival 2023 – Handel’s Semele – Joélle Harvey, Stuart Jackson, Jennifer Johnston & Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen; directed by Adele Thomas; conducted by Václav Luks
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
West Green Opera – Stephen Sondheim’s 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
Bampton Classical Opera – Salieri’s At the Venice Fair
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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