Opera
Butchering La bohème
Opera is “relatable” already
Magic moments
A bomb dropped into the frightful world of mid-Victorian musical entertainment
A full Platée
A daring production of a daring work
Bedlam bingo
Sex, death, sado-masochism and blasphemy in a heady cocktail
Of course we need opera
Click-hungry editors should stop enabling philistinism
Making art of the Holocaust
As dramatic opera, The Passenger inhabits a grey zone of guard–prisoner relations
Off with the fairies
Unsurprisingly, the most brilliant of all English music-theatre pieces are mostly overlooked
Singers have a voice, too
Study of the Western canon is often reduced to a politicised debate: power and patronage versus individual genius. The truth is far more complex
Operettas for the apocalypse
As we career merrily ever deeper into the end-times, what is the appropriate soundtrack for civilisational collapse?
The geopolitical prescience of Handel
On opera’s flirtation with current affairs