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Iván Fischer’s take on Monteverdi’s opera offers a radical rewriting within the trappings of a traditional staging.

The final opera in Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi 450 trilogy features an excellent cast and inspires deep emotion.

Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria, the second opera of the Monteverdi 450 trilogy being toured by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, had a strong performance in Salzburg.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner's Monteverdi 450 trilogy began its Salzburg run with a tear-jerking concert performance of L'Orfeo.

A popular performance of Handel's oratorio Deborah, featuring Baroque opera singer Xavier Sabata and English soprano Rebecca Bottone, garners warm applause at the Halle Handel Festival.

A strong cast and fine playing from La Nuova Musica gives Handel's Berenice a reasonably fair outing, but its original plot weaknesses constrain this opera from being anything more than a curio for the Handel connoisseur. 

A very naughty translation and some fine singing make for a delightfully comic evening of Cesti's recently rediscovered Orontea at Wigmore Hall. 

L’Ospedale sounds like it should be a newly written opera about the NHS, but actually, it's a 350 year old piece. It makes for an hour's delectable light operatic entertainment.

“... and as Venice in many things surpasses all places else where I have been, so are these Operas the most excellent of all its glorious Vanities.” So wrote the entranced English traveller Richard Bargrave in 1655. These days, however, Venice travels to England in the form of the English Touring Opera’s 2013 autumn season production.

When the Baroque movement in art ended, the backlash was severe. The very adjective became an insult: the cold, clear, rarefied eye of 18th-century Neoclassicism found its opulence stifling, its luxury oppressive, and its profusion of ornament, ugly.

Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is a tricky thing to stage. It’s not an opera, with its own story-line, but a masque, a series of musical interludes intended to slot into a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One solution could be just to perform it in concert, but the music is so dramatic that it lends itself wonderfully to stage action.

Premier volet de la trilogie Monteverdi programmée à la Philharmonie en ce début de saison, cet Orfeo dirigé par Sir John Gardiner s'avère aussi envivrant musicalement que vocalement.

Wie Pur ti miro lange Zeit als Ohrwurm melodiert, so wird die gesamte Mammutproduktion immerwährenden Nachhall und Eindruck in der langen und großen Erfolgsgeschichte Gardiners Monteverdi-Exegese hinterlassen.

Was lange währt, wird ziemlich gut: Sir John Eliot Gardiner und seine Montverdis überzeugen mit dem Premieren-Ulisse in Berlin.

Die beiden Protagonisten (Poppea und Nerone) sind ausgezeichnete Sänger. Sie wurden stimmlich nur von Marianna Pizzolato als Ottavia überschattet, mehr noch vom mächtigen Bass von Gianluca Buratto als Seneca.