Stabat Mater

From the altar of their customary home in Edinburgh’s 1691 Canongate Kirk, Calton Consort presented an a cappella concert enigmatically entitled “Translated Daughters”. The enigma dissolved upon hearing W.H. Auden’s text for Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia. It features the arresting couplet: “Translated Daughter, come down and startle / Composing mortals with immortal fire.

Olivia Fuchs directs Monteverdi's early opera in a sparse staging with a consistently fine cast. 

Emily Howard's new opera, an Aldeburgh Festival commission, takes an ambitiously modernist approach to a dystopian story of loneliness: a tough, but thought-provoking work. 

While on a wildlife safari holiday in the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana, Alexander McCall Smith asked his guides to take him across a river to where two primatologists were researching baboon behaviour. Baboons are matriarchal and uniquely in common with humans, high status is inherited.

Opera Bohemia bring the boisterous tale of Gianni Schicchi to the Edinburgh Fringe in a fun-filled hour of musical delight.

Tête-à-Tête opens with groundbreaking community opera, an interesting piece of Jamaican history, and two superb solo operas from the talented Tim Benjamin, finishing on a high with the glorious Silent Jack.