Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Gidon Saks

Invigorating in the pit, Britten’s Billy Budd never gets its sea legs on the National Theatre stage.

A successful concert hall Rake's Progress at the Edinburgh International Festival with an impressively strong cast of singers, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Conservatoire Voices under Sir Andrew Davis.

Deutsche Oper Berlin’s Billy Budd, although musically satisfying, suffers through an ambiguously set production. 

There’s something quite strongly “neoclassical” about the whole historically-informed performance movement. Someone like Sir John Eliot Gardiner, who has championed the use of detailed historical knowledge of performance practice and instruments, has never actually been attempting to transport us all back to the 18th century. That would be futile, obviously.

It’s not often that operas in English get performed in Germany, and so I was somewhat surprised to see such a large and important company as the Berliner Staatsoper taking on Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress.

The overture to Der Freischütz is a familiar concert warm-up, but the opera itself is a rarer find these days. It wasn't always so. With over fifty performances in the eighteen months following its 1821 Berlin debut, Weber's spooky tale of souls traded for magic bullets was an instant hit.