"Rossini’s La donna del Lago at the Royal Opera House boasts a superstar cast. Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez are perhaps the best in these roles in the business at this time. Yet the conductor Michele Mariotti is also hot ...
Tonight a new production of Rossini's La donna del lago opens at the Royal Opera House. Originally this would have been a reprise of the production at the Opéra national de Paris, but that got pulled. So we in London get the same strong ...
Andris Nelsons has been appointed Chief Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He's completely different from predecessors like Seiji Osawa and James Levine, so maybe he represents the start of something big? He's a very innovative, adventurous ...
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha gets a keynote performance at this years The Three Choirs Festival gave him his first major commission the Ballade in A minor for full orchestra, first heard in Gloucester. It was his ...
What other music Festival can claim a 300-year history? This year marks the 286th Three Choirs Festival, an event central to British music .It's also much more than a music festival. Some people have been regulars for well over 70 years! When the ...
Even though it's nearly 90 years old, Alban Berg's Wozzeck can be a hard sell because it's perceived as too "modern" for some. Thus the ENO Wozzeck at the Coliseum is an ideal introduction to the opera, to Berg and indeed to modern music ...
Queue buster TIP ! One of many Proms rituals is compulsive complaining. One of the usual targets is the first day tickets go on sale. This year 114,000 tickets were sold online in the first 12 hours, an increase of 17% over 2012, ...
The winter of 1739-40 was one of the coldest in memory. The Thames froze, and snow blocked access to and from London. Two weeks after Handel completed L'Allegro, il Pensoroso ed il Moderato the long frost was broken by a terrible storm ...
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre isn't the original Elzabethan Globe theatre but a 1997 recreation, geared to the international market for Shakespeare experiences. It's Stratford-upon-Avon South, and even more "authentic" in some ways in that it's ...
A broadcast of K A Hartmann's Simplicius Simplicissimus on BBC Radio 3 today, available online for 7 days. An anti-facist, anti-war opera written in Germany while the Nazis were in power? K A Hartmann's Des Simplicius Simplicissimus ...