GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – October 2018
When you have been in the business for as long as I have it is especially gratifying to reacquaint oneself with an operatic work one has long admired but never seen staged. Samuel Barber’s Vanessa is such…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – Awards Issue 2018
I recently spent two blissful hours at my local Curzon cinema watching a brilliant documentary entitled The Opera House. No prizes for guessing which opera house might regard itself as indomitably singular or indeed which might have…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – June 2018
With the arrival of this column came the reinstatement of an important strand of repertoire in Gramophone’s pages – Musical Theatre. As I have argued for some time – in these pages and elsewhere – Music Theatre…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – May 2018
She adorns the front cover of this issue just as she has so many magazine covers in the 100 years since her birth – but eclipsing every personal memory of Birgit Nilsson on record and in the…
GRAMOPHONE: From Where I Sit – April 2018
The dramatic and somewhat predictably mixed reaction to Barrie Kosky’s staging of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera House recently (a show first seen in Frankfurt in 2016) once again raised questions as to how far opera…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Heggie – Great Scott
There’s a cunning (and witty) interplay of ideas at work here. Sport versus Art, better yet American Football versus Opera; an opera within an opera, better yet an Italian opera within an American opera. You can absolutely…
GRAMOPHONE Review: Heggie – It’s A Wonderful Life
It’s interesting – and revealing – that Pentatone has a designated “American Operas” series. It’s an acknowledgement, if you like, that there is something very particular, very recognisably “American”, about the USA’s contribution to the genre, something…
Boris Godunov, Royal Opera House
As one who grew up listening to what other people did to Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov – most notably the gifted gift-wrapper Rimsky-Korsakov – the seven-scene original is doubly startling in its concision and starkness. This is a…
L’Etoile, Royal Opera House
It’s a kind of French Mikado. In a distant and exotic kingdom a victim must be found to celebrate the King’s name-day. No little list, no W H Gilbert wit, either, but a handful of delicious tunes,…
The Force of Destiny, London Coliseum
Whenever the name Calixto Bieito is mentioned it’s invariably to mention ‘the toilets’ – not the reasons for them, just the fact that they were there at all. That production of Verdi’s A Masked Ball was one…
