Reviews of live performance

Along with his contemporaries Bernardo Pasquini and the rather younger Alessandro Scarlatti – and although less prolific than them – Stradella stands at a transitional period in the history of...
Photo: wigmore-hall.org.uk
Two Piano Quintets here. culminating in César Franck’s – though both are so emotionally charged that it could have been the other way around – suggesting that this concert may have...
Photo: Chris Lee
One night after its world premiere at home in Verizon Hall, the Philadelphia Orchestra brought John Luther Adams’s timely Vespers of the Blessed Earth to Carnegie Hall. Due to Illness,...
Photo: Chris Lee
One of a very few works in which he does not refer to folk melodies or hymn tunes, Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question is best described as a philosophical statement...
Photo: Helen Murray www.helenmurrayphotos.com
When it was premiered in 1920, Korngold's The Dead City (Die tote Stadt) must have struck its first audiences as a daring and raw confrontation of the theme of grief, so soon...
Photo: lso.co.uk
The film mogul Alexander Korda released his science-fiction vision Things to Come in 1936. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are on the war path, spreading liberal doses of death,...
Photo: Robert Piwko
Oxford-born Alexander Soddy’s career has been predominantly in German opera houses – until last year he was music director of the Mannheim Nationaltheater (since 2016) – and he has a...
Photo: nyphil.org
Composed for the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1727, Bach’s St Matthew Passion – a vivid retelling of the story of the betrayal, execution, and burial of Jesus – is set...
Photo: Silvestri
Ernani (1844) was the first of several operas commissioned from Verdi by La Fenice (La traviata would be among them) and so a new production, as this by Andrea Bernard, at Venice...
Photo: Helen Murray www.helenmurrayphotos.com
Long condemned for its reliance on a regressive, played-out seam of romanticism, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s first full-length opera and biggest 1920s’ hit would appear to have confounded the sceptics and...
Photo: Bruce Bennett
To close its 2023 season, Palm Beach Opera offers an outstanding production of Verdi’s final opera, Falstaff. Michael Chioldi portrays Sir John Falstaff with vocal power and brilliant comedic skills,...
Photo: earlyopera.com
Handel wrote Scipione at the height of his success with his first opera company in London in 1726, after the three acclaimed masterpieces Giulio Cesare, Tamerlano, and Rodelinda. The piece has not re-established a place...
Photo: Chris Lee
Olivier Messiaen’s musical language is a world unto itself, spanning cultures, continents, and eras in both structure and form. Fascinated by birdsong, complicated rhythms, and love – both sacred and...
Photo: barbican.org.uk
There have been quite a few film versions of the Anglo-Saxon epic myth Beowulf, a cinematic gift that keeps on giving with a ferocious dragon, a dashing hero, and lots...
Photo: cbs.co.uk
Vilde Frang took the Elgar into her repertoire some five years ago and she has the measure of one of the composer’s most private, oblique works. It may have been...
Photo: barbican.org.uk
The last time I heard Evgeny Kissin in a solo recital was here, at the Barbican, in 2019, a full year before Covid-chaos and three before the Ukraine war, the...
Photo: Mark Senior
In the canon of G&S operettas, Ruddigore (1887) is perhaps best known as the work which satirises nineteenth-century melodrama and gothic horror stories, and offended Victorian sensibilities by having a group of ancestral portraits...
Photo: Chris Christodoulou
Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges (1925) is usually paired with his other one Act opera, L'heure espagnole. But in the Royal College of Music Opera Studio's double bill this spring, directed by Liam...
Photo: Steve J. Sherman
Among Handel’s twenty-nine oratorios, one of the most spectacular is the pageant-like Solomon (1749), splendidly performed on this occasion. The anonymous libretto is based on stories in the First Book...
Photo: Fadi Kheir
Michael Tilson Thomas’s thoughtful sequence of songs to texts by Rainer Maria Rilke was introduced by MTT in an amusing ten-minute spoken introduction to a highly unconventional piece that intermixes...
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