Handel: Il Trionfo del Tempo e Disinganno
London Handel Festival, The Broschi Ensemble, 5th March 2010
Under the auspices of the prestigious London Handel Festival, The Broschi Ensemble, founded by counter-tenor 
Cenk Karaferya, delivered a stylish account of Handel’s first oratorio Il Trionfo del Tempo e Disinganno (The Triumph of Truth and Time) this Friday evening in the Grosvenor Chapel. Il Trionfo is not one of Handel’s better-known works, but it deserves to be. It was written in 1707 in Rome during Handel’s apprenticeship in Italy. Though Handel plundered his Almira for some of Il Trionfo’s material, this allegorical work is bursting with so many musical ideas that Handel often reused movements from it for his later operas. Handel also revived Il Trionfo a few times in London.
Massenet: Chérubin
Guildhall School of Music & Drama, 4th March 2010
Spin-offs don’t feature that often in the operatic canon. In a fair number of works, the main characters are dead by the time
the curtain falls, of course, but you may be given to wondering what becomes of those who survive events to tell the tale. Mozart’s characters, in particular, would seem a fruitful source to plunder: What becomes of Leporello after his master is dragged into hell? Do the four lovers in Così resume their original relationships? The Marriage of Figaro alone leads to a number of questions. Do Figaro and Susanna live happily ever after? Can the Countess ever really forgive the Count? And what of the page boy, Cherubino? How does his military career, initiated by events in Act I of Figaro, develop and what of his endless teenage infatuations?
Measha Brueggergosman in Recital
Wigmore Hall, 7th March 2010
Measha Brueggergosman returned to the Wigmore Hall this Sunday for an afternoon single act recital which mined the rich seam of Lieder 
and chanson involving the moon and the night. From Schubert’s bereft An den Mond to the hothouse sensuality of Liszt’s Oh, quand je dors via Strauss and Berg there is clearly enough potential for several full evenings of repertoire so this hour of music was inevitably the equivalent of a taster menu. Having said that, it was still a satisfying and rewarding programme with plenty of variety.
Handel: Tamerlano
The Royal Opera, 5th March 2010
Tamerlano was to have been Placido Domingo’s Covent Garden swan song to the tenor repertoire; but sadly, this eagerly-anticipated event 
never happened, as the much-loved star was forced to cancel all five of his scheduled appearances in the role of Bajazet in order to undergo preventative surgery for an unspecified gastric condition. It is perhaps beside the point now to mention the obvious issue of Domingo being stylistically unsuited to Handel, but nevertheless his cancellation came as a crushing disappointment to thousands of opera-goers and The Royal Opera even took the highly unusual step of offering ticket holders a 20% refund in the form of a credit voucher to compensate.
Handel Singing Competition, London, 4th March 2010
This is the ninth year that the Handel Singing Competition has been held and previous winners have included Andrew Kennedy, Elizabeth 
Atherton and Erica Eloff. St. George's, Hanover Square is an advantageous venue for singers of 18th century repertoire with good acoustics, a warm atmosphere and the knowledge that Handel himself used to attend services here in his final years.
Verdi: Requiem
Royal Festival Hall, 2nd March 2010
There are at least two possible approaches to performing Verdi’s Requiem; reverently, in the grand English choral manner, or a more fiery, 
Italianate approach. Long before last night’s performance began, I was fairly convinced we’d be hearing the former interpretation. All the signs were there, after all; the massed ranks of the Bach Choir, three experienced English soloists and a conductor who is renowned for his work with cathedral choirs. What a wonderful surprise to find my preconceptions completely blown away.
Verdi: Attila
The Metropolitan Opera, New York, 27th February 2010
If there is no disputing taste, there may still be ample reason to question judgment. When one of the leading opera houses of the Italian musical
empire presents the belated debut of a world-renowned Verdi conductor in a Verdi premier, with a generally first-rate cast, but then wraps such an important event in a production which is in equal parts misleading and weak-minded, perhaps questions of judgment should be raised. Where the house's General Manager has gone on record repeatedly to deride the 'stand and sing' school of opera, only to immure these singers in a physical still life, then perhaps questions of judgment should be raised.
Bizet: Carmen
Welsh National Opera (Cardiff), 27th February 2010
Carmen's popularity as an opera is reflected in its constant pole position in the repertory of Opera Houses around the 
world. La Scala ventured with an exciting production in December 2009, combining a high profile, controversial director, Emma Dante with the experienced musicianship of Daniel Barenboim. At the Metropolitan Opera House, Carmen is currently being given the Richard Eyre magic to great acclaim, with the allure of Angela Gheorghiu in the title role later on the run. At the Wales Millennium Centre on Saturday evening, Welsh National Opera presented a revival of the 1997 co-production with Scottish Opera, directed by the indomitable French team, Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser.
Opera Britannia Interview: Ivor Bolton
Recently I caught up with the celebrated conductor Ivor Bolton at The Royal Opera ahead of their first staging of Handel’s Tamerlano, which 
allowed me to ask him about his passion for Handel, his time in Salzburg and Munich and his views on performance style within the baroque repertory.
Catalani: La Wally
Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, 27th February 2010
La Wally is a confusing work, both musically and dramatically. Rarely does it ever rise above its incoherent structure to achieve anything other
than its often-supposed mediocrity, but for all its influences from Wagner, Gounod, Meyerbeer and Verdi, Catalani’s farewell to the world (he died the year after its premiere in 1892 from tuberculosis, aged just 39) does in fact achieve something more than the sum of its parts would suggest. Acts I and II are extraordinarily weak and poorly developed – characterised by the sort of bombastic music you expect to hear in French grand opera, but are then followed by Acts III and IV, which show a leaner musical development, more taut, more intuitively written from the perspective of marrying music with drama (the opera emerged pretty much at the birth of verismo, but has little in common with this artistic movement).
Ligeti: Le grand macabre
Adelaide Festival (Australia), 26th February 2010
As with the Perth Festival, so the Adelaide Festival (which is biennial rather than annual) generally likes to come with up an operatic 
blockbuster to generate excitement, indeed controversy if possible, as well as garner cultural capital. Ligeti’s Le grand macabre was famously described by its composer as an anti anti-opera, and, while one sees what he means, these days it can hardly be considered all that outré in the context of regular offerings of regietheater and 21st century works. It was premiered in the 1970s and revised in 1996. While there was some attempt to get South Australian tongues wagging, what might once have been considered offensive or daring is now greeted with a knowing laugh. One Adelaide citizen was impelled to write to the Weekend Australian (a national broadsheet) describing it as a “gruesome farce”, but that person was working round to a political analogy.
invited to join composer Anna Meredith, sound designer Sam Godin and the classically trained Indian singer Falu, in an evening where they can record Satyagraha-inspired loops that will form part of the “Remix”. 
even as warmly as they did to Thomas Adès’ The Tempest. Both these works were broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, and each of these broadcasts has been cleaned up and recently issued on double CD (Adès on EMI, 2009; MacMillan on Chandos, 2010). Both operas also have composers who enjoy successful careers as conductors, but while Adès conducted The Royal Opera House forces at Covent Garden, it was unfortunate that on the night when The Sacrifice was broadcast from the Wales Millennium Theatre with Welsh National Opera, MacMillan was unwell and was therefore forced to hand over the reins to Anthony Negus.
of recession by the magnificent margin of point squit of a zillionth, it was nice actually to encounter something quite so uncomplicatedly positive as her recital. Opera singers, in the up-close and personal context of a recital room, fall into extremely contrasting categories, ranging from the all-singing, all-dancing Ethel Merman-esque firecrackers (Cecilia Bartoli) to the half-barmy and catatonic (um, better exercise some discretion here, I suppose) by way of sassy, sweet ‘n simple, straightforward or sepulchral, the raunchy or the reverential, the bullish or the businesslike. 
Covent Garden, the Metropolitan and, as preserved on this DVD, the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, each of the original directors was no longer around to supervise his show's latest outing. This matters less, of course, in stagings that cleave close to the scenic and theatrical givens of the work as conceived by Hofmannsthal and Strauss in microscopic detail, than in ones like that under consideration here that avail themselves of varying degrees of liberty and licence.
