Not many singers could entitle a recital album The Beautiful Voice and ensure that in every sense it lived up to its name. Renée Fleming’s now iconic album is shortly to have a successor and in this…

Backstage at English National Opera, David McVicar & Sarah Connolly discuss Charpentier’s Medea. It is Wednesday 6 February and just prior to the afternoon stage rehearsal at the London Coliseum I sit down with David McVicar and Sarah…

Sir John Eliot Gardiner dislikes being branded a “Baroque specialist” and with a discography exceeding 250 recordings and embracing a bewildering diversity of repertoire one can understand why. From Monteverdi to The Merry Widow he is and…

Fresh from four cycles of Wagner’s Ring at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and a run of performances in one of his signature roles – Wagner’s Flying Dutchman – the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel was…

Backstage at English National Opera, Edward Seckerson meets Corinne Winters – Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata. Peter Konwitschny’s highly filmic new staging of Verdi’s La Traviata is now an opera in four “pictures”: no interval, no grandstanding finales – not…

It’s an amazing statistic in itself that Jonathan Miller’s now iconic production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado is one-fifth as old as the piece itself – that is 26 years. For 25 of those Richard Suart has groveled…

Sunday 18th November 2012, London Jewish Cultural Centre at Ivy House It was a real a real privilege being invited by the London Jewish Cultural Centre to interview Maxim Vengerov at Anna Pavlova’s old London home –…

There’s more than just Football and Formula One and the Rio Olympics to divert global attention to Brazil – indeed the whole of South America – at the present time. Classical music has never been hotter than…

The image of the toilet cubicles lingers on but no one can deny the fierce theatricality that shakes up English National Opera whenever Calixto Bieito’s in town. His anarchic Don Giovanni made us reassess the motivations of both sexes…