Such thoughts on the part of a humble reviewer, and very possibly most members of an audience too, were prompted by BBC ...

It seems odd to warm to the idea of the American Dream today, but it is worth remembering that for much of the second half of the nineteenth century and… ...

In Wordsworth’s great ode Intimations of Immortality there is an imaginative reference to “the clouds that gather round the ...

Unlike many of his forebears in the nineteenth century, he did not adapt the version of the story by Goethe but, instead, returned to the older tradition of the story as found in the puppet plays.

Up to now I only knew this opera by the San Carlo recording of ...

Composed originally for a Vienna premiere in 1864 the present version of Les FÈes du Rhin, or Die Rheinnixen, was published in the last few years as part of the critical edition of the complete works ...

An introduction traces the historical development of opera interludes from seventeenth-century sinfonie, which commanded only minimal audience attention, to the nineteenth-century Wagnerian preludes ...

Michael Maniaci (Photo: Lake, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) The Rise of the Male Soprano? Michael Maniaci has a fight on his hands. In the world of baroque opera he’s a young singer who seems to have it ...

In 2016 director Daisy Evans invited us to enter the creative processes involved in staging and performing Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen – “we’re creating it as we go along” – presenting riotous ...

much of it fruitful, some of it perhaps less so, between Brecht and Weill, came ...

Today Bluebeard is considered one of BartÛk’s finest scores, fraught with Gothic darkness and abundant in orchestral riches and impressions. It is essentially a ‘static’ work and thus works well in ...