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Another masterful, sprightly and unstuffily fun production of Handel at Iford: Christopher Cowell's Partenope is erotically charged, well cast and comically compelling. 

Jeff Clarke's characteristically high-octane style seems made for the sarcastic, hyperactive existential madness that is Candide in this little gem of a production for Iford. 

An especially adapted version of Purcell's Fairy Queen, reworked by Timothy Nelson, inspires an exceptional reading from a talented young cast at Iford. 

John Savournin takes Mozart's Magic Flute on an exotic adventure into the Peruvian rainforest: and retrieves more than a sprinkling of Inca gold. 

Iford's stone cloister makes a suitably eerie setting for a fine traditional account of Verdi's Macbeth, notable for its powerful male leads, from Iford Festival Opera and the CHROMA Ensemble.

Bruno Ravella's version of Handel's Agrippina moves the action from Classical Rome to the avaricious Eighties in a sharp, amusing night at Iford.  

While it may seem perfectly formed for the full grand opera treatment, Verdi's classic Un ballo in maschera can also work extremely well on a small scale, as shown by this intimate and compelling treatment by Timothy Nelson at Iford. 

We all know the story about how an opera is supposed to end, but it turns out it is definitely not over until all the fat, black-leather-jacketed, bearded gentlemen sing, and then ride triumphantly away with you on their Harley-Davidsons... 

Rapturously romantic, intimate, moving, unforgettable: more English summer opera should be like Iford. And the garden is like Narnia in the spring. 

Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem Op 45 (German Requiem), as performed by The City of Bath Bach Choir at the Wiltshire Music Centre last Saturday, is a sombre work. Hardly surprising as the word ‘requiem’ usually refers to the Catholic Mass celebrated for the dead.

What a wonderfully piquant contrast this concert gave us – the Brahms German Requiem followed by Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo. Yet in both, after passages of melancholy reflection, of turbulence and stress, at the end all is well and we can rest in peace. The Requiem is a demanding sing.

Zur Aufführung gelangte ein neuzeitlich premiertes Opern-Pasticcio, dem das junge Ensemble mit innewohnender Entdeckerlust und stimmlichen Fähigkeiten zu einem – damals noch versagten – Erfolg verhalf.