Rechercher des critiques de musique classique, opéra et ballet | Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Dominic Wheeler did full justice to Britten’s brilliantly colourful and haunting score right from those first eerie glissandi.

The most moving scene in 20th-century opera went for nothing

Guildhall School of Music and Drama tackles Gian Carlo Menotti's rarity, a tale of stateless and paperless 'citizens of nowhere' seeking refuge amid Kafkaesque bureaucracy. 

Bleak and uncompromising in vision and intention, Britten's The Rape of Lucretia gets a suitably dark, discomfiting outing at Guildhall. 

A light and sassy comedy from Wolf-Ferrari showcases the latest crop of talent from the Guildhall in a stylish 1960s production from Yannis Thavoris with video by Dom Baker, directed by Stephen Barlow.

In this double bill, we get a violently enthusiastic little farce from Donizetti which, though fiery, is definitely not his best work; but next, we are treated to the revival of a brilliant, beautiful one-act opera by Malcolm Arnold. 

The two works in Guildhall School’s Baroque opera double bill, Thomas Arne’s The Cooper and Stradella’s San Giovanni Battista had little in common except that both are rarely performed, yet somehow made quite good bedfellows. 

The future of opera is in good hands, if Tuesday night’s opening of Jonathan Dove's The Adventures of Pinocchio at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama is any indication. 

A double bill of rare operas: it’s like Christmas has come early in London. The Guildhall School are pairing Debussy’s The Prodigal Son with Donizetti’s sparkling court comedy Francesca di Foix.

I’m sure before long I’ll see a production of Daisy Pulls It Off that opens with modern day soldiers charging onto the stage waving rifles about – it seems to be the first image directors reach for these days.

Despite a relatively easy-to-follow storyline, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro is an opera that is hard to pull off entirely successfully. Musically, it requires enormous vigour from both cast and orchestra; dramatically, this opera buffa demands strong acting skills in order to eke out its moments of farce.

Opera school productions are designed to provide experience for their students and showcase their talents to an audience sprinkled with casting directors. Clearly, the Guildhall School have decided to extract maximum value from their current production by staging not one opera but three, with different casts and even different orchestral musicians.

Otto Nicolai’s very German take on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor was a big hit in the mid-19th century but has been infrequently performed since then, largely because Verdi’s version, Falstaff, completely eclipsed it.

In 1790s France, a young noblewoman, Blanche de La Force, decides to enter a Carmelite convent. As the increasingly paranoid revolutionaries close in, Blanche, her family and the nuns hold a series of discussions on their circumstances, the danger, their faith and, ultimately, their martyrdom.