Here are some of the best concerts and opera performances our critics have seen in the past few weeks. We’ll also point out when you can catch up with further performances or on-demand streams of these events. Feel free to join in the conversation in the comment section at the end with your own recommendations.
Buxton Festival — Bizet and Verdi make for an impressive opening
At a time when our national opera companies can’t muster five new productions in a year, the Buxton Festival is putting on five in a fortnight. Great for opera lovers in Derbyshire; puzzling for those elsewhere. Just one more mystifying feature of the UK’s subsidised arts scene for Lisa Nandy, the new culture secretary, to get her head around. She will find there are many. La tragédie de Carmen (90min) to July 16 and Ernani (180min) to July 17, buxtonfestival.co.uk
Richard Morrison
Read the full review of Buxton Festival here
Un giorno di regno — Verdi’s unloved comedy bursts into life
Verdi’s second opera, usually translated as “King for a Day”, itself lasted only a day when first staged in 1840 at La Scala, Milan. This very high-profile flop nearly persuaded the young composer to give up altogether. Un giorno di regno hasn’t been revived much since. But rarity value is not the only reason to see Christopher Alden’s new staging. Alden throws pretty well everything at the task of keeping the audience laughing more or less continually throughout. To July 22, garsingtonopera.org
Richard Morrison
Read the full review of Un giorno di regno here
East Neuk Festival — Czech masterpieces light up a rural corner of Scotland
For five days each June the little villages on the east coast of Fife host a remarkable musical celebration. This is the East Neuk Festival, and it’s remarkable because for two decades it has attracted some of the world’s top chamber musicians to play in a rural corner of Scotland that otherwise has little high-quality music-making. To be broadcast on Radio 3 and BBC Sounds later this year
Richard Morrison
Read the full review of East Neuk Festival here
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – a bewitching night of Britten
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about transformation, shape-shifting and fantasy. At Garsington Opera you work with the tangible: the wraparound Chiltern woods, the singers often visible from the wings as they come on stage. This bewitching Britten production revels in these contrasts and doubles: night and day, the mundane and the magical. To July 19, garsingtonopera.org; at the Royal Albert Hall on September 10
Neil Fisher
Read the full review of A Midsummer Night’s Dream here
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Katya Kabanova — Janacek’s tragedy lifted by full-blooded lead
Janacek’s terse 1921 tragedy is a tonic in times of turmoil. However grim our own circumstances may seem, it always looks a lot worse in that Russian village where the despairing Katya is driven to drown herself in the Volga by her spineless husband, unreliable lover and monstrous mother-in-law. To July 12, grangeparkopera.co.uk
Richard Morrison
Read the full review of Katya Kabanova here
The Merry Widow — you’ll dance along with the lady of the house
Merry is an understatement. Not since Danielle de Niese’s debut at Glyndebourne as Handel’s Cleopatra has the singer hoofed across a stage this much. The only thing lacking from the many dance sequences that de Niese throws herself into is Craig Revel Horwood coming on stage to award her ten out of ten. To July 28, glyndebourne.com
Neil Fisher
Read the full review of The Merry Widow here
Il trittico — Welsh National Opera fights back with a cracking show
Whether it’s shocked, in tears or laughing, David McVicar’s handsome, smart production, co-created with Scottish Opera and revived here by Greg Eldridge, has the audience right where it wants them. To October 5, wno.org.uk
Rebecca Franks
Read the full review of Il trittico here
Blond Eckbert — a terrific sense of unease in this psychological thriller
Judith Weir, recently turned 70 and about to end her ten-year stint as Master of the King’s Music, is a featured composer at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. The programme includes two new works from her prolific pen but also several older ones including, to open the festival, one of her most enigmatic operas — Blond Eckbert. Touring Oct 5-Nov 16, englishtouringopera.org.uk
Richard Morrison
Read the full review of Blond Eckbert here
Hallé/Elder — a fitting finale for Mark Elder’s time with the orchestra
How much of a difference does a conductor really make? It’s a question I’ve been asked dozens of times as a music journalist and from now on I might point to this concert as my answer. Because here, as the massed choirs and splendid orchestra of the Hallé made the Bridgewater Hall ring with glorious sound, was the evidence that the right conductor does, of course, make all the difference. The Hallé is touring to July 21, halle.co.uk
Rebecca Franks
Read the full review of Hallé/Elder here
Carmen — Glyndebourne’s engaging show has a mesmerising heroine
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Many companies are putting their faith this year in the seemingly eternal box-office appeal of Carmen. Nowhere more than Glyndebourne, which has chosen Bizet’s opera to open its 90th-anniversary season, and almost to close it as well, with no fewer than 21 performances (and a change of cast and conductor) between now and the end of August. Wisely, then, the production is placed in very safe hands: the seasoned American director Diane Paulus. And unless you are looking for some outlandish and pretentious “concept”, her modern-day but essentially straightforward and well-organised staging will not disappoint. To August 24, glyndebourne.com
Richard Morrison
Read the full review of Carmen here
Italian Radicals — charm and ferocity from Berio, Maderna and Nono
There were many things I didn’t think would come from this concert of mid-to-late 20th-century avant-garde music. A tune, for one. And I certainly didn’t expect to get charm. Italian Radicals, showcasing the composers who helped to revive the desperately flagging Italian contemporary music scene after the Second World War, also resurrected the age of virtuosity. More than once I found myself watching a dazzling individual player. Available on BBC Sounds
Daniel Lewis
Read the full review of Italian Radicals here
LSO/Simon Rattle — supreme and savage Shostakovich
The Fourth may be a symphony in which violently contrasting moods almost punch each other out of the way — the sinister marches, the anguished and twisting woodwind solos, the frenetic prestissimo eruptions for the strings, and finally the eerie sense of life ebbing away without purpose — but Rattle made this savage parade at least sound tragically inexorable. And the LSO, swollen to Red Army proportions, played superbly: responsive, powerful and virtuosic. Available on mezzo.tv
Richard Morrison
Read the full review of LSO/Simon Rattle here
Tell us your recommendations in the comments below
