Reviews Index
by Sam Smith
There are many who wish for the same revival of interest in Haydn’s operas as Handel’s have enjoyed over the past fifty years. There is…
There’s a comforting feeling that arises from attending a concert with old-fashioned programming. An overture, a concerto, a symphony. Classic stuff. Chineke!, however, is far...
When Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique performed Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz on the penultimate night of the 2011...
Elgar’s two synoptic New Testament oratorios The Apostles and The Kingdom tend to sit in the shadow of his The Dream of Gerontius (text now...
The conductor Carlo Rizzi said that if he could save only one opera from destruction, it would be La bohème, because it is “…the perfect...
Although there is no scriptural name-check, the trope of the archangel Gabriel being God’s trumpeter is long-established: through Paradise Lost, Spirituals and even Cole Porter’s...
Although State Fair was written to be a film, Cinderella was the only musical that Rodgers & Hammerstein produced specifically to be shown on American...
Mahler’s second symphony always presents a programming challenge; it can’t be split, it makes for a lengthy half-concert, and its tour-de-force nature puts many other...
The Mask of Orpheus was last fully staged before this reviewer was born. It has returned to the London Coliseum, where it was premiered, after...
With its minimalist rotating set, topped with a roof outline in fluorescent strip-lights, Damiano Michieletto’s new production of Don Pasquale is a contemporary take on...
Verdi wrote his first comedy Un giorno di regno in 1840, and his second Falstaff in 1893. He had been offered a range of comic...
The Silver Lake is not the best known of Weill’s compositions, while the librettist for the singspiel, Georg Kaiser, is today less famous than Brecht,...
An indication of the popularity of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie, which sees an aristocratic woman become caught between her love for the valet Jean and...
‘S. P. Q. R.’ proclaims the inscription on the brutal concrete which surrounds Caesar as he announces his conquest – Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate...
A more literal translation of Stephen Storace’s Gli sposi malcontenti, which premiered at Vienna’s Burgtheater on 1 June 1785, would be The Discontented Newly-weds. However,...
On paper this did not look like the most inspiring Last Night of the Proms. Even by the measure of recent years, the first half...
The final week of the 2019 Proms season saw the festival observe a tradition from its early years, by focusing Monday night’s concert on Wagner,...
Tuesday evening’s Prom, curated by composer and lead-guitarist of Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood, was a lucky-dip of works whose minimalist inclinations ensured they hung together well....
Sunday evening’s Prom was clearly an attempt to follow through the ‘nature’ theme begun with John Luther Adams’ In the Name of the Earth...
Pizzica is a music and dance form specific to the Salento peninsula, and it is part of the wider tarantella style of folk-dance, supposedly a...
While it may have been Prom 60 that hit the headlines for constituting Bernard Haitink’s final concert ever in the United Kingdom, the one that...
