Maybe it’s old news that Les Arts Florissants is actually an opera, not just the name of Early Music guru William Christie’s famed eponymous group of players. It is a 40 minute opera, or musical idyll ...

The people of Judah are in mourning. The Overture is heard against a simple backdrop, focusing attention on the music, and not on the “false idols” of decorative frippery. In this time of crisis, the ...

Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have once said: “China is a sleeping giant, when she wakes she will shake the world”. It occurred to me while listening to the Chinese-American Tan Dun in charge of ...

The Wigmore Hall, which saw so many premieres of his works and where he made his professional debut in 1942, is honouring the ...

‘Canticle’ is the term Britten used to denote an extended setting of a text of spiritual substance. The five Canticles span his career: the first dates from 1947, two years after the celebrated ...

Time as a great healer or gentle eraser is a large part of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. If musing on transience and ageing are prevailing themes, that’s neatly balanced by the light entertainment ...

His celebrity-sibling, the soprano Nancy Storace, a favourite with Emperor Joseph II and prima buffa in the Italian opera troupe that he had established at the Burgtheater two years earlier, sang the ...

The opera was given its premiere in Dresden on 29 May 1901, and a measure of its success resides in the fact that it was given its New York premiere just a year later in 1902. Fully in line with the ...

the creation of opera, an Italian invention. Primo Riccitelli, whose name is ...

of ‘the Yellow Label’ have been central to the recording of Wagner’s ...

and House-debut, Gary Lehman, who earned the standing ovation he received for that feat, sharing it with the lady, Janice Baird, who jumped in to join him in mid-scene. It was not the greatest ...