I am dozing on a sun lounger; under a Carob tree; in the Algarve; overlooking the Ria Formosa Natural Park and a glittering sea beyond. I am dreaming. A Daily Telegraph sketch writer has just become Prime Minister; England has won the cricket World Cup; I am about to...
Charleston is a whizz of a town. This is my third visit for the annual Spoleto Festival. I stay in the old French Quarter, a delightful mishmash of narrow, rickety streets with uneven sidewalks. At night gas lamps flicker. Each crowding house is different, many with...
“Are you prepared to slay a mighty dragon, rescue a fair young maid from a harem, bake an Italian cake and take a tilt at windmills? Then you’re ready for Wexford Festival Opera 2019”. Assume the answer is “yes”. So says Ian Fox, on an introductory CD accompanying...
“Rigoletto is the cruellest opera, breeding Tragedy out of dead minds, mixing Amorality and desire, stirring Numbed moral sense with easy death.” Apologies to Thomas Stearns Eliot. And on that cheery note, on the first day of spring, a sunny, equinoctial day in New...
David Ross, the mobile mogul who built his Carphone Warehouse empire in the “loadsamoney” era of the nineties, has revealed his true character in his Foundation’s twenty-tens Nevill Holt opera project. It turns out Mr. Ross has “loadsataste.” Nevill Holt is no grand...
It’s not far, as the crow flies, from the Metropolitan Opera House, Lincoln Center, Manhattan Midtown, to The Flea Theater, Thomas Street, Tribeca; 25 minutes by rattly subway. But, for a softie Met regular it might as well have been a different planet. Why the...
It’s been a nightmare getting around New York this week. A measles scare, because anti-vaccine fundamentalists refused to be needled amidst a 285 case outbreak, caused a medical shutdown in gentrified Williamsburg, Brooklyn; then there was an outbreak of TubercuVerdi...
Falstaff is Giuseppe’s Verdi’s last, sizzling “hurrah”; a mould-breaking “hurrah” at that. Almost eighty when he wrote it in 1893, Verdi surprisingly chose a comedy as the capstone of his triumphant career, only the second out of a repertoire of 28 works; the other...
A new work by American composer, David Lang, is always an important event. He self describes as a passionate, prolific and complicated composer. This is true. He is big potatoes. I grabbed one of the few remaining seats at the premiere last Thursday of Prisoner...
“Hojotoho heiaha!” It’s the Met’s Wagner Ring Cycle. In 2010, Peter Gelb, controversial managing director of Metropolitan Opera appointed in 2006, put his head on a chopping block and virtually invited critics to hack it off. There were already rumblings at some of...
The gleaming white building – a giant beached whale of a building, perched on a glittering lake shore, pointing eastward across sunlit blue water, basking on a crystal clear day – unexpectedly moved. It slowly beat its wings. No, I’m not on the Canadian tokes. I’ve...
I’ve just seen an opera from inside a wedding cake. Well, it’s an understandable mistake. France’s Troisième République Palais Garnier confection of an opera house, commissioned by Emperor Napoleon III in 1860, but not completed until 1875 when Napoleon was...