The Royal Opera House delivered a remarkably gripping new production of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci by Damiano Michieletto. The Italian directorial wunderkind unified the verismo double bill, setting the operas in the same Mezzogiorno village where some characters from both

A full house at London’s Cadogan Hall greeted the Hong Kong Philharmonic last week for their performance of music by Fung Lam, Beethoven and Prokofiev as part of the hall’s 2014-15 International Orchestra Series. In London’s crowded concert schedule, the

Richard Wagner’s Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) is an opera with unusually extensive chorus segments. And Director Tim Albery’s production at the Royal Opera House puts the chorus to unusually good use. Enthusiastic, dramatically intense and vocally polished, this

At a time when rumours of Sir Simon Rattle returning to the UK, no less to head the London Symphony Orchestra, were running thick and fast, it was no surprise that I found myself in a sold-out Barbican Hall, preparing

The casual operagoer would be forgiven for not being sure whether The Royal Opera House’s new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Ballo in Maschera was set in Boston, as it usually is, or in Stockholm, as it often is and was

We’re blasted with the full force of the chorus right from the beginning of the show, accompanying a brutal prison drug search. This was one of many lights in which we saw the English National Opera chorus during ENO’s production

Now well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, we well and truly live in a global age. News breaks across the globe within minutes; we enjoy food from the other side of the planet in our own kitchens;

I arrive into Bristol an hour early, so I grab a quick coffee in the bar of the Bristol Old Vic Theatre, the recently-renovated landmark in Bristol’s cultural history. As I sit in the bar someone leans out a door