Tim Hochstrasser is a historian teaching early modern intellectual and cultural history at the LSE. He has a long-standing commitment to the visual, musical and dramatic arts, and opera above all, as a unifying and inspiring vehicle for all of them.
Samuel Barber’s Vanessa (1958) is a work at once accessible and elusive, and a successful production revolves around breaking down that paradox and re...
Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese prose-poet, is still little known in the West despite the fact that his writings, in both Arabic and English, remain conti...
As the final opera this season Opera Holland Park presents the second and usually performed version of ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’. It is an exceptionally suc...
Each year Opera Holland Park includes one less well known or even forgotten work from the era of Puccini. This year’s choice, ‘Isabeau’ dates from 191...
This opera matinee has become not just a focal point for the Jette Parker Young Artists themselves at the end of their association with Royal Opera Ho...
Verdi’s last opera is a two-fold miracle – of both economy and prodigality. He started with the advantage of Boito’s superb libretto which strengthen...
Three brothers, in three acts, and spread over three generations: this is the pattern for Ben Power’s adaptation of Stefano Massini’s sprawling accoun...
Britten’s The Turn of the Screw was premiered as long ago as 1954, his first project after the relative failure of his coronation opera ‘Gloriana’. Bu...
The relationship between text and dance is at once both tense and potentially rewarding to each. Dance can illustrate or enhance a verbal narrative, b...
As a primarily non-verbal creative medium dance is always a challenge to the reviewer trying to find suitable words that are evocative rather than pre...
