Prom 2: Lerner & Loewe “My Fair Lady”, Royal Albert Hall – review
Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady belongs in that select group of perfect musicals where pretty much every choice, every decision, every song placement simply cannot be disputed. The time-lapsing build to “The Rain in Spain” is…
Verdi “Otello”, Royal Opera House
It is the most resplendent of vocal fanfares that brings Otello to the stage in Verdi’s wonderful opera and Aleksandrs Antonenko – the latest in a most distinguished lineage (including Vickers and Domingo) to have strode into…
The Gershwins’ “Porgy & Bess”, Cape Town Opera, London Coliseum
Behind poster images of iconic black crusaders – from Nelson Mandela to Steve Biko – the township that is Catfish Row is revving up for another day. And such is the pumping dynamism of the Cape Town…
Bryn Fest, Royal Festival Hall
There could be no Bryn Fest (Terfel, that is) without show tunes. But the spectacle of the great Welsh bass-baritone arriving on stage sporting a wrap-around “Madonna” mic is not one I care to repeat in a…
Mozart “Le nozze di Figaro”, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
It’s the age of long hair and raging hormones, wide lapels and wider collars, the age of new found “permissiveness” where the world and his dog are gagging for some extra-curricular congress and the great and good…
Albarn & Norris “Dr Dee”, English National Opera
A blackbird descends, Damon Albarn sings of England, and a cavalcade of our national identity – from punk rocker to city gent, cricket to morris dancing, suffragettes to Lord Nelson – passes before our eyes, each representative…
Britten “Billy Budd”, English National Opera
The sight of Kim Begley’s old and broken Captain Vere silently mouthing Billy Budd’s death sentence as it is read out in the final scene of Britten’s opera will be one of the enduring images of David…
Puccini “La Boheme”, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
More Basildon than Bastille, David McVicar’s grungy staging of La Boheme heralded the new millennium amidst concrete and steel, fire hazards and fire escapes, chavs and chav nots, bringing our “bohemians” into the here and now with…
Janacek “The Cunning Little Vixen”, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
It might be deduced that the only thing worse than working with children and animals would be working with children as animals. But Leos Janacek was unfazed by the old Hollywood adage and his cartoon-strip derived opera…
Magdalena Kozenà, Mitsuko Uchida, Wigmore Hall
It’s extraordinary how the symbiosis of spirit and rightness of timbre between an artist and a composer can turn a recital around. The Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kozena is not a natural recitalist tending to overwork and over-illustrate…