Lammermuir Festival unveils its 2025 season. Mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean performs Stuart MacRae’s “Earth Thy Cold is Keen.” MacRae directs. Performance Date: September 4, 2025 Ravel’s “L’heure espagnole” and Walton’s “The Bear” are presented in a double bill. Performers include Lea Shaw, Luvo Maranti, Jamie MacDougall, Edward Jowle, Daniel Barrett, and Chloe Harris. Jacopo Spirei is the director and Kenneth Macleod {…}
After a successful European tour, maestro Dinis Sousa takes Monteverdi Choir on the road, with a U.S. tour featuring performances of Bach’s Mass in B Minor and Handel’s “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moder” before moving on to London’s St Martin-in-the-Fields. Inspired by Milton’s poetry and compiled in a libretto by Charles Jennens, Handel’s work captures a spectrum of human {…}
(Photo: Opera Holland Park 2022 © Ali Wright) Following on from last season’s imaginative realization of “The Pirates of Penzance,” Charles Court Opera returned to the Holland Park stage in a co-production of “HMS Pinafore”. W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s satire on class, manners, and buffoonery as directed by John Savournin. Savournin has built quite the reputation in G&S as {…}
Credit: (OHP Marketing/Opera Holland Park) The last offering from Opera Holland Park’s (OHP) 2021 summer season was another collaboration: W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance”, co-produced with Gilbert & Sullivan specialists Charles Court Opera, postponed from last summer. A Playful Production How do we imaginatively enter the topsy-turvy world of Gilbert & Sullivan, with its surreally distended {…}
(Image Source: Official website) The great critic Edward Said saw Mozart and Da Ponte’s “Così fan tutte” as a work of irreconcilable contradictions: astonishingly tender in its explorations of longing, fear, and regret, yet also strangely cold and unredeemed; a world of libertinage and manipulation that burns forward without any clear moral purpose. The frivolity of its scenario is powerfully {…}