SATURDAY 10TH JULY 2010 BERNSTEIN “MASS” Royal Festival Hall Mass is Leonard Bernstein’s most personal, most provocative piece. His daughter Jamie has described it as his “most Lennyish” piece – meaning that it knows no inhibition, that…
SUNDAY 4TH JULY 2010 MOZART “DON GIOVANNI” Glyndebourne Festival Opera The crushing first chord of the Overture plunges us into darkness – a sudden and scarifying blackout. Through the gloom of residual light we can just make…
MONDAY 28TH JUNE 2010 MOZART “DON GIOVANNI” Opera Holland Park There’s narcissism and there’s narcissism and in his terrific new staging of Mozart’s Don Giovanni for Opera Holland Park director Stephen Barlow leaves us in no doubt…
TUESDAY 22ND JUNE 2010 MASSENET “MANON” Royal Opera House No doubt about national identity when the opening ten minutes or so of the drama is given over to an impatient lust for food and wine. Throw in…
FRIDAY 11TH JUNE 2010 DMITRI HVOROSTOVSKY Wigmore Hall Dmitri Hvorostovsky dedicated his first Wigmore recital in many years to the great Russian mezzo Irina Arkhipova – a voice which by all accounts set this hall vibrating for…
THURSDAY 10TH JUNE 2010 LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/ ELDER Barbican Hall At the spiritual centre of this exciting re-match between Mark Elder and the London Symphony Orchestra was Benjamin Britten’s intellectual and emotional kinship with Dmitri Shostakovich. Heartache…
TUESDAY 1ST JUNE 2010 BIZET “THE PEARL FISHERS” English National Opera For all its singable tunes, lusty choruses, and that duet, Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers belongs on the cheese counter of operatic drama. To be frank, there’s…
SATURDAY 29TH MAY 2010 NIGEL KENNEDY/ ORCHESTRA OF LIFE Royal Festival Hall We’d had the first two movements of Bach’s Violin Concerto in E, Nigel Kennedy and his newly formed Orchestra of Life bathed in a haze…
THURSDAY 20TH MAY 2010 BRITTEN “BILLY BUDD” Glyndebourne Festival Opera Britten’s gripping masterpiece begins in fateful indecision oscillating in the violins between major and minor key centres as the old and broken Captain Vere looks into his…
TUESDAY 18TH MAY 2010 PUCCINI “TOSCA” English National Opera It comes as no surprise at all that Catherine Malfitano, a once notable Tosca herself, has fashioned a staging of the opera which frees the singers in ways…