The social permutations of love are beguilingly explored in the 90-minute stage traffic of Marivaux’s The Lottery of Love, with Paul Miller’s production at the Orange Tree Theatre making the most of the venue’s unencumbered in-the-round space to dance the action along at a brisk pace. The only adornment in Simon Daw’s design is an elaborate chandelier, bedecked with candles and hanging roses, but the sheer élan of the piece more than occupies the stage in itself.The theatre's Richmond location couldn’t be better either, the Georgian villas around its Green and along the Thames just the kind Read more ...

It's a rare concert when nothing need be questioned about the orchestral playing. The usual nagging doubts – about whether any of the London orchestras has a recognisable sound-identity, or whether Rattle's swipe agains the two main London concert halls as merely "adequate" means players can't make a proper mark here – simply vanished. Under regular visitor Jakub Hrůša, the Philharmonia last night simply sounded like a top-quality central European orchestra producing the ideal light, shade and energy for Brahms – and it made its own warmth, a very difficult thing to do in the Festival Hall. Read more ...

Recent British-based productions have taken Wagner's paean to creativity, the reconciliation of tradition and the individual talent, at face value. Graham Vick's long-serving Covent Garden colourfest, with its brilliant staging of the night brawl; David McVicar's sunny Biedermeier celebration at Glyndebourne; best of all, Richard Jones, making Wagner's immaculate all-about-art proposals crystal clear first for Welsh and then for English National Operas: all three have had their share of joy and lightness. Not so Kasper Holten's semi-mess of a show, which is nothing to laugh about at any point Read more ...

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari has never quite been a one-work composer. No points for knowing the fizzy overture to his delightful 1909 pro-smoking comedy Il segreto di Susanna; quite a few more if you know the whole opera. Extra credit for being able to hum the once popular "Serenata" from I gioielli della Madonna: but move on to his major operas – L’amore medico, say, or I quatro rusteghi – and we’re definitely into specialist territory. So it’s not entirely surprising that Wolf-Ferrari’s Violin Concerto hasn’t been performed in the UK until tonight, even once you set aside the uncomfortable Read more ...

“Who says Mozart is not like Rossini?” remarked Juan Diego Flórez, about a quarter of an hour into his debut recital at Symphony Hall. “There are seven high Cs in this aria.” And with a flicker of notes from the pianist Vincenzo Scalera, he was off into "Vado incontro", from Mitridate by the 14-year old Mozart. He wasn’t joking, either. You could count each of those Cs as they burst – the ultimate sonic weapon in the arsenal of the superstar tenor.There was no question of them sounding unforced; perhaps, no possibility. Phrasing went by the board as one after another they flashed out. The Read more ...

Late January, and the soul longs for winter's end. Which is why Rimsky-Korsakov's bittersweet fairy story about the fragile daughter of Spring and Frost whose heart will melt when she discovers true love, allowing the sun to bring back warmth to earth, is so apt. Unfortunately the time of year is also one for striking singers down, so we missed two of the principals on Saturday night. The good news: their covers were fine enough to carry the charm of director John Fulljames's mostly magical storytelling.It's not easy, given the plot's meanderings, even with major cuts that lop off some of Read more ...

From India, here is a hoard of what really looks like treasure, much of it emerging into the light of day after decades, if not a century. Jewellery, sculpture, textiles, paintings, carvings, architectural fragments, domestic interiors, metalwork, drawings, books, furniture, toys, photographs, plasterwork – all are gathered together in a glittering display in galleries unified under the name of Lockwood Kipling.Who was he – other than an evocative name seemingly out of Trollope or Dickens? John Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911) is far better known as the father of Rudyard, than as a pioneering Read more ...

Birmingham audiences are a supportive bunch. There was never much likelihood that they’d greet Andris Nelsons’s first Birmingham appearance since he departed for Boston in 2015 with less than the same warmth that they keep for other former CBSO music directors. Even so, he must have been gratified to walk out to a capacity audience – for a programme of Bruckner and Maxwell Davies – and a 30-second ovation, complete with a couple of cheers, before he’d given so much as a downbeat.Of course, the CBSO has already embarked on a whole new adventure, and with an artist as exciting as  Read more ...

The arrival of this oppressively atmospheric 19th-century historical drama is being trailed as the BBC's bold attempt to break the Saturday night stranglehold of soaps and talent shows. No doubt they were encouraged by the success of all those Saturday night Scandi dramas on BBC Four, and if Taboo falls short it won't be because of a lack of stellar names.Front and centre is Tom Hardy, starring as the previously-presumed-dead James Keziah Delaney who suddenly reappears in London in 1814 at his father's funeral. Hardy is also co-creator (with his dad Chips) and co-producer of Taboo with his Read more ...

Painted in 1891 by Tom Roberts, A Break Away! shows us a flock of maddened, thirsty sheep careering down a hillside stripped of grass by drought, accompanied by rollicking sheepdogs and cowboy shepherds on horses. If those sheep pile on top of one another into the puny stream at the bottom of the hill, injury – even death – will occur. The perspective is vertiginous, and the scene almost visibly pulsates with energy. It is one of Australia’s best-loved paintings (main picture), emblematic of the growing prideful nationalism of a new country – well, new to Europeans who ignored, Read more ...

Yorkshire-born screenwriter Sally Wainwright has carved a distinguished niche for herself as chronicler of that brooding, beautiful region’s social and familial dramas. After the romance of Last Tango in Halifax and the gritty panorama of Happy Valley, she has settled on perhaps the quintessential troubled Yorkshire family, with awesome bleakness on the side: the Brontës.Despite a difference of 150 years in setting, To Walk Invisible is not only a seamless progression from Wainwright’s previous work, but the story comes, ready-made, both achingly sad and also driven by a passion that can’t Read more ...

This would have been an intriguing recital at any time. But in the context of Brexit, a programme of songs in a second language, of music expressing composers’ fascination with another country, another landscape, another sound-world, had a poignancy that was hard to ignore.We heard German composers tackle Italian, Russians swap their covered vowels for England’s more open ones, and even Italians trying their hand at Scottish folksongs. The results weren’t always fluent, sometimes struggling to manoeuvre themselves into the borrowed culture, but they were telling, especially when delivered by Read more ...