John Amis online

Wexford Festival 2009 – late October Emmanuel Chabrier 1841 – 1893 had a short career, has a short list of works but a big reputation with h...

Brahms and Tchaikovsky agreed only on one thing: they both adored Carmen . The new production of Bizet’s evergreen masterpiece at Covent Gar...

FLUTE Richard Adeney Brimstone Press (PO Box 114, Shaftsbury SP7 8XN) £12.50, p.222 If the performance is routine, perhaps with a duff condu...

A musical opinion on the latest production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (October 5) would have to...

LIGETI ’S SCABROUS OPERA The last thing we see in this new production of Ligeti’s opera by English National Opera in the London Coliseum, f...

Traditionally the Devil has all the best tunes, but in Berlioz’ The Damnation of Faust the tenor has some good ones and Marguérite has some...

A Concert of charm, spice and virtuosity St. James in Piccadilly is the only Wren Church built on an original site – consecrated 1684. Wren ...

Bread and Jam Rossini once exclaimed how wonderful opera would be if there were no singers, a thought that came to me forcibly when sitting ...

Professor Barry Cooper in his Prom programme note gives an assessment of his character somewhat different from the usual one of a man irasci...

It is good that music is once more a social affair. Not perhaps to the extent of music-making in the home, as was once the custom. Nowadays ...

Mark Twain once said that a Wagner opera started at six o’clock and when it had been going for two and a half hours your watch said twenty t...

Jolly Good Show Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is usually described as a semi-opera in a Prologue and five acts, libretto by anon, an adaptation...

I went to the Summer Programme of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme in the Royal Opera House on Sunday afternoon 9 July. I was expect...

When Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the new director of the Aldeburgh Festival was asked by a journalist what his reaction to the music of Benjamin ...

Bellini not all Dreamy When thinking of Norma most of us remember dreamy music, as in the aria Casta Diva , the nocturne-like spell suppose...

Cavalli in Hampshire First performance in England (Grange Park Opera, June 6) of one of forty or so operas by Cavalli. Who he? Pier Francesc...

There was booing at the close of Covent Garden’s latest new production Alban Berg’s opera Lulu , provoked by a staging that was a no-no, no ...

Donizetti had obsessions. Including one with the United Kingdom? Beside Roberto Devereux, which opened the Holland Park Opera season in Lond...

In case you live anywhere near Basingstoke and haven’t yet visited the Anvil Concert Hall (opened 1994) let me wave a flag for it. First –cl...

If that great expert on Handel’s operas, Winton Dean, took three large pages to explain the plot of the Master’s 1726 Alessandro , your scri...