In his 2016 opera Blank Out, Dutch composer Michel van der Aa has managed to create a new kind of operatic ‘reality’ that resonates powerfully with today’s Zeitgeist. Highly recommended.
After tumbling deliriously to the end, if they had played one of Brahms' Hungarian Dances as an encore, they would have had them the audience dancing in the aisles.
Welser-Möst led The Cleveland Orchestra in Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen along with his own transcription for string orchestra of Beethoven’s Op.132 quartet.
It's possible to have nothing but admiration for Mark Morris as a choreographer, yet his actual dances I often find pedestrian with a limited vocabulary. The works are interesting to see once, to see what he can do with classical music that has no obvious dance rhythms, but I rarely want to see them again.
As part of their ‘summer’ season, Vasily Petrenko conducted the RLPO in Mendelssohn’s sunny “Italian” Symphony. Boris Giltburg uses Beethoven’s Emperor as a showcase for his flawless talents.
The program notes include a quote by August Bournonville that says, "The Dance ... is essentially an expression of joy." And in this short but sweet program the company proved that it can still give a master class in showing the joy of The Dance.
After the New Hollywood String Quartet's first violinist went down with a rotator cuff injury, 21-year old Colburn School student, violist Johanna Nowik, saved the day.
Every July, Buxton’s charming opera house hosts an international festival of opera, literature and the arts. This year the festival opened with a strong familiar favourite, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin.
Lovers of Lewis Carroll’s work would be enthralled by Boojum!, a clever musical quest celebrating the life and inner thoughts of Reverend Charles Dodgson, whose alter-ego was Lewis Carroll.
A welcome return to the Glyndebourne Festival for Melly Still's staging, which brings out the full emotional range of Dvořák’s fairytale of denial, heartbreak and forgiveness.
This year’s revival of Andreas Homoki's production features excellent principals, choruses, and sublime orchestration under Fabio Luisi’s seasoned baton. The staging takes far fewer accolades.
If the audience response was not very enthusiastic, it's because Ratmansky's Sleeping Beauty four years after its premiere still comes across as more of a museum piece than a living, breathing ballet. This is a Beauty that never really wakes up.
Davide Livermore's new production of Donizetti's Anna Bolena offers moderate pleasures, with solid performances by Ermonela Jaho in the title role, and Carmen Topciu as Jane Seymour.
The Staatsballett Berlin closes its season in great style at the Deutsche Oper. Majestically performed, John Cranko's Romeo and Juliet is a still delight of movement and décor.
Graeme Murphy's new Madama Butterfly opens with arrestingly kinky imagery and heavily exploits digital projections thereafter, but the joy of the production is in the uniform excellence of the performers, headed by the outstanding Karah Son in the title role.
In Robert Carsen's staging, the “dead city” is absent: the scenery showing a bourgeois room that one imagines overlooking a bright avenue in Vienna or Berlin rather than a dark alley in Bruges.
An evening of instrumental works found inspiration in a Christian Wolff composition, a Salvadoran folk song and the voices of Angela Davis and Arnold Schoenberg.
The second Dance@TheGrange builds on its reputation for fearless programming, with performances from Company Wayne McGregor and Ballet Black, and a standout new work by Ballet Black's Mthuthuzeli November
Birthday concerts are strange things. If a hall is going to celebrate your birthday, you'd want to be in the audience and have some of your favourite musicians entertain you.
Andreas Homoki’s new Zurich production capitalises on some quirky staging, but features superb voices in its principal roles and shows the best of the house’s joint choirs.
