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Handel's third English oratorio is presented in strictly traditional fashion at the 2024 Halle Handel Festival but nonetheless generates drama, excitement and excellent singing. 

A concert performance of a Purcell semi-opera can never fully succeed, but compromise is worth it, if it enables us to hear a significant part of a major composer's output.

Handel’s Messiah is not too re-imagined, thankfully, with an almost Crystal Palace sized choir although not all singing at once!

Even Baroque specialist John Butt could not persuade the BBC Symphony Chorus to sing in tune

Sir Roger Norrington and a strong cast joined a Baroque-style London Philharmonic Orchestra in a highly accomplished Dido and Aeneas, preceded by Handel’s clean and stately Water Music.

This year’s Gala Conzert at Göttingen featured two different works not commonly heard and certainly not together, with excellent soloists and the Christ Church Cathedral Choir

A Haydn choral sandwich and meaty Mozart filling served up by the RPO, the pianist Llŷr Williams, City of London Choir and Hilary Davan Wetton.

Ovid’s Metamorphosis (on which the episode of Acis and Galatea is based) set in an Irish pub? Cowboys in place of shepherds and a bartender instead of a nymph?

Bach: Sacred and Secular became the focus for a creative partnership between Bach scholar John Butt and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

Two choral works by Brahms and a striking rarity by Schumann performed by the Constanza Chorus and the London Mozart Players directed by Joanna Bywater.

Symphonie Altlantique, a period orchestra composed of young professional musicians based in The Hague, gave a very engaging performance of Handel’s Giulio Cesare at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. 

Ex Cathedra's Chorus in fine voice for a "small scale" Messiah in Birmingham. 

Institutional violence has been a running theme in Torsten Fischer’s series of Gluck operas at the Theater an der Wien, albeit with a lid kept firmly on the idea of actual conflict.

Probably no other work in the repertoire has such mystical status as Bach's Matthew Passion. Phrases like "The Greatest Work in the Western Canon", trip glibly off the tongue while failing to illuminate its greatness or acknowledge its strangeness. It is the sacred cow of sacred cows.

Riccardo Primo, Re d’Inghilterra (or in English, Richard I), is Handel’s only opera based on the story of an English monarch, and it was premiered in the coronation year of King George II in 1727 (although in fact it was composed the year before but postponed).

When one sets off to the opera to attend what is usually called a ‘double bill’, one will, most of the time, expect to see two operas clearly contrasting in character. More unusual is to find two extremely different works, hardly sharing anything between themselves, presented in a reading that digs deep for any possible echoes.

The Royal College of Music’s International Opera School has long been a training ground for some of the world’s most famous opera stars.

If anyone tells you that all opera is highbrow, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld provides you with a perfect example of the opposite. It's coarse, raunchy, fast, fun, and continually pokes fun at the conventions of grand opera.

Sur le fond comme sur la forme, le chef-d'œuvre inachevé de Mozart dirigé par Leonardo García Alarcón laisse sur sa faim, malgré l'implication des forces de l'Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France.

Paul Agnew tire le meilleur de ses Arts Florissants au Festival d’Ambronay, dans les madrigaux audacieux de Schütz comme dans quatre plus classiques Cantates de Bach.

Spécialistes de la musique ancienne, les Musiciens du Louvre, amenés par Marc Minkowski annonçaient une Passion selon Saint Jean des plus intéressantes à la Halle.