We have just booked some opera tickets for the Santa Fe Festival (Christine Brewer in Alceste and Natalie Dessay's first La Traviata plus Tom Ford's opera designing debut). For 2009! This seems to be part of a growing trend, the stretching out of booking periods so that for popular events you can find yourself booking for a ridiculously long period in advance.In the case of Santa Fe, this is unders...

Glyndebourne's new Hansel and Gretel has debuted, with Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as the Witch, sung at tenor pitch. Now I have no problems with the witch being sung by a man, a counter-tenor friend of mine has performed it at soprano pitch albeit with just piano accompaniment; he created a rather scary, slightly androgynous figure, miles away from the pantomime dame. But I have severe problems w...

My review of Donizetti's Requiem performed by Czech forces is here. A largely creditable performance played confidently and with not a little style .... And my review of Jake Heggie's For a Look or a Touch is here. Both reviews on MusicWeb International.Fine performances, much of interest but not the composers' best work......

So we are about to embark on that peculiar phase in London life when the Proms begin. Concert and opera going life in London never closes, it merely metamorphoses and the Proms is perhaps the strangest metamorphosis of all. A festival which lasts some 2 months with a concert (at least) per night, rather then relaxing in the summer Londoners would seem to prefer to be exhausted. This was particularl...

On Saturday we went to the Pink Singers 25th Anniversary concert. The choir was founded in April 1983 and I ran it from July 1983 until 1988, during which time it grew from a simple idea to a self-governing choir and a member of the NFMS. We celebrated our 5th anniversary with a concert which mixed Eisler's cantata Die Mutter with other more popular music from 1936 (the year the cantata was premiè...