My first experience of Koskyan excess went swimmingly. After the spare and considered Tell-Tale Heart and the bloodied but balanced Women of Troy, I was almost beginning to worry that it wouldn’t, that I was maybe becoming too accustomed to

It’s hard to say who’s more impressive: Cheryl Barker, whose performance in the title role is the kind that inspires a certain inability to put a sentence together, or Neil Armfield, whose production is among the most visually and emotionally

Anyone who has ever spent an extended period of time in a television news studio—either on the floor or in the control room—will know, and have come to secretly love, the musical qualities of its internal rhythms. Directions are relayed,

A rollicking near-cartoon of an opera, considered by many to be the definitive opera buffa, Gioacchino Rossini’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia is a kind of madcap prequel to Mozart’s La nozze di Figaro. While it lacks the genre-transcending resonance of

Contemporary audiences are at once both made for and yet terribly ill-suited to opera. On the one hand, we live in the society of the spectacle, thriving on a diet of bigger-is-better and quasi-operatic media events. On the other (which

 “When fortune calls, offer her a chair.” –  Yiddish Proverb It may sound like a bizarre observation – and indeed, on the face of it, it is one – but I can’t help but feel that Neil Armfield’s production of Mozart’s