James Imam is an arts journalist writing for publications including The Financial Times, The Times, Musical America and Opera magazine. He grew up in Manchester, read anthropology at Cambridge and has since lived in Milan. As a once-aspiring countertenor he has an abiding interest in Baroque music.
The inaugural edition of the Tsinandali Festival offered fine musical rewards as well as breathtaking scenery, divine local food and warm Georgian hospitality.
Festivals and academies breed familiarity and mutual compassion between audiences and returning artists. Yet the warmly informal feel of this concert owed mostly to the close relationships between the musicians themselves.
Playing under its music director Gábor Takács-Nagy, the VFCO radiated joy for music-making; the very thing Verbier – and now Tsinandali – is all about.
“There is a room in my head in which dialects, languages, scales and ancient songs reverberate”: we speak to Italian cellist Giovanni Sollima about his upcoming performances at the Sounds of the Dolomites festival and his adventurous spirit.
Edward Gardner clearly has a thing for the Czechs. A month after he made his Royal Opera main-stage debut with Janáček's Katya Kabanova, here he was with the Filarmonica della Scala to conduct a strongly Czech programme.
Viotti will return to La Scala to conduct Gounod's Roméo et Juliette in 2020. The programme this time round gave an indication of some of the positive qualities to expect. It also warned of some potential pitfalls.
Traditionally, Italy's most unforgiving loggionisti are reputed to reside at Parma's Teatro Regio. Thankfully for the cast, they appear to be a dying breed.
Svoboda’s mirrors continue to provoke interesting considerations. Titled above the stage, they project a birds-eye-view of the action to the audience, making voyeurs of us all.
The Magic Flute's roots in popular theatre come through most strongly throughout Vick's production, which sparkles with a wealth of witty detail. But treatment of the work's socio-political undercurrents doesn't work nearly as well.
Muti unlocks the immense dramatic potential of Verdi's revolutionary score, providing a wealth of colour and detail capable of conjuring mysterious Shakespearean worlds with no need for staging.
