Handel
Tamerlano, The Grange Festival review - Handel brilliant in parts, but you have to wait for the dramaSaturday, 11 June 2022
Handel’s operas have long posed, and still pose, severe problems for the modern theatre, and especially the modern director – all those endless streams of wonderful but emotionally more or less generalised arias hitched to interchangeable... Read more... |
Serse, The English Concert, St Martin-in-the-Fields review - star turns from five remarkable womenFriday, 06 May 2022
You know great singing when you hear it. In Handel, for me, that was when Lucy Crowe took over a Göttingen gala back in 2013; in Mozart, most recently, it came from Emily D’Angelo making her Royal Opera debut in La clemenza di Tito. Last night, in... Read more... |
Alcina, Opera North review - flat update redeemed by excellent vocal performancesMonday, 07 February 2022
This new production of Handel’s Alcina opens well, with no preamble, the protagonists’ arrival on the island inhabited by the titular sorceress suggested by footage of rushing water projected onto the backdrop. This is billed as Opera North’s first... Read more... |
Theodora, Royal Opera review - God, love, sex, death - and terrorismTuesday, 01 February 2022
Some of Handel's late London oratorios, like the indestructible Semele, work well as fully staged operas. Others, usually the ones which swap mythology for the sacred, need dramatic help. Theodora is one of them, though Peter Sellars' now-legendary... Read more... |
Classical CDs: Two clarinets and stereo snare drumsSaturday, 29 January 2022
Handel: Six Concerti Grossi Van Diemen’s Band/Martin Gester (BIS)I wanted to hear this disc purely on the basis of the group’s name. My instincts didn’t let me down. Martin Gester and Van Diemen’s Band, (based, naturally, in Tasmania) give... Read more... |
Messiah, Dunedin Consort, Butt, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh - period clarity infused with loveMonday, 20 December 2021
This time last year, the moment I knew things were really bad was when the Dunedin Consort cancelled Messiah. All performances since the summer of 2020 had been online films, but Dunedin cancelled even their online Messiah because it would involve... Read more... |
Iestyn Davies, Aurora Orchestra, Collon, Kings Place review - Elizabethans and extraterrestrialsMonday, 27 September 2021
Music in London has faced down plagues, puritans, philistines and planners over the four centuries spanned by the Aurora Orchestra’s season-opener at Kings Place on Saturday. This concert in the venue’s “London Unwrapped” strand filled its main hall... Read more... |
Hallenberg, Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists, Gardiner, BBC Proms review - a vindication of voicesThursday, 02 September 2021
Choral singers have suffered more than most from erratic and irrational Covid prohibitions while riskier mass pursuits have gone ahead. So when one of the world’s great choirs returned to the Proms with the conductor who has guided them for over... Read more... |
Amadigi, Garsington Opera review – geometries of enchantmentSunday, 27 June 2021
In Handel’s operas (as, indeed, elsewhere in art and life) the worst witch may turn out to have the best character. Without the sorceress Melissa, splendidly full of evil ruses yet endowed with a generous measure of tragic pathos, Amadigi di Gaula... Read more... |
Messiah highlights, English National Opera, BBC Two review – short-cut sorrow and redemptionSunday, 04 April 2021
Well, it wasn’t quite Messiah, but it was a source of joy. In ENO’s end-of-lockdown staging, BBC Two’s transmission of Handel’s resurrection song delivered a scant 54 minutes of music from the Coliseum on Easter Saturday. In contrast, two ancient... Read more... |
Iestyn Davies, Arcangelo, Wigmore Hall review - heavenly Handel as the lights dim againWednesday, 16 December 2020
Just before the doors closed again on live audiences at the Wigmore Hall, Iestyn Davies and members of the Arcangelo ensemble celebrated the private side of a very public composer. The peerless counter-tenor, whose powerfully polished command of... Read more... |
Ariodante, Royal Opera online review – stylish, but confinedMonday, 23 November 2020
“After black and gloomy night, the sun shines all the brighter,” sings hero Ariodante after a life-threatening bout of jealousy nearly scuppers a royal wedding. There’s a snag in Handel’s dramaturgy: all that sunshine in preparation for the nuptials... Read more... |
