@HackneyEmpire

With the coronation of Charles III to come later this year, it is apt that English Touring Opera’s spring season pre-empts that with this rare production of Rossini’s occasional but sparkling and rewarding work, Il viaggio a Reims, composed for the celebrations on the crowning of the French king, Charles X in 1825. (Time was when …

English Touring Opera – Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims with Lucy Hall, Luci Briginshaw, Julian Henao Gonzalez & Richard Dowling – directed by Valentina Ceschi; conducted by Jonathan Peter Kenny Read More »

Lucrezia Borgia is virtually synonymous with notoriety and intrigue, and Donizetti’s opera of 1833 certainly recalls the crimes and misdeeds of which she was accused by opponents in her own time, and by detractors among historians and polemicists subsequently. Her fearsome reputation is also sardonically alluded to in the English translation used in the surtitles …

English Touring Opera – Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia with Paula Sides, Thomas Elwin & Katie Coventry – directed by Eloise Lally; conducted by Gerry Cornelius Read More »

With Agrippina (1709) Handel came of age as a composer of opera. Its zippy succession of often concise numbers, memorably evoking the characters and their wiles through music, makes it a good place for those unfamiliar with Handel’s operatic output to start. Its wry retelling of how Nero came to power in ancient Rome through the machinations …

English Touring Opera – Handel’s Agrippina with Paula Sides, Esme Bronwen-Smith & Hilary Cronin – directed by James Conway; conducted by Leo Duarte Read More »