Writers

Culture
Uneasy futility at the opera: Manon Lescaut and In the Penal Colony
Alexandra Coghlan reviews Jonathan Kent’s new production of Manon Lescaut at the Royal Opera House and Shadwell Opera’s In The Penal Colony at the Arts Theatre.

By Alexandra Coghlan
23 June
Culture
Sounds from the sweatshop: Marxist Chillwave and Dialogues des Carmélites
Classical music perhaps wouldn’t be everyone’s medium of choice to shout about issues, ideas and beliefs but two recent events made a strong case for why it should be.

By Alexandra Coghlan
12 June
Culture
Glyndebourne 2014: Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin
From acid social satire to romance, the new season at Glyndebourne has something to offer those willing to go beyond mere appearances.

By Alexandra Coghlan
27 May
Culture
Pluck and courage: BBC Young Musician 2014
BBC Young Musician is a biennial reminder that Britain has got more than just talent. What its young performers have is a craft.

By Alexandra Coghlan
15 May
Culture
Tiny, candlelit and intimate: L’Ormindo at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Live opera is as physical as art gets, though you would never know that from sitting in any major opera house.

By Alexandra Coghlan
11 April
Culture
Rodelinda and Die Frau Ohne Schatten: the operatic search for truth amid the noise
Two new shows from English National Opera and the Royal Opera House might sound completely different, but each finds the still small voice of human truth hidden underneath the excess.
By Alexandra Coghlan
20 March
Culture
It may have come a year too late, but the ENO’s Peter Grimes is no postscript
A year after the Britten centenary, David Alden’s Peter Grimes presents us with a society and a community irretrievably damaged, while the English Touring Opera’s King Priam is a domestic drama, hamstrung by matters of scale.
By Alexandra Coghlan
03 March
Culture
Don Giovanni holds a mirror up to society after the year of the “selfie”
History may be written by the victors but Holten gives literature’s greatest loser, condemned again and again to hellfire, the opportunity to tell his tale.
By Alexandra Coghlan
14 February
Peter Maxwell Davies: “Making music is a social contract”
Alexandra Coghlan meets the Queen’s composer.
By Alexandra Coghlan
30 January
Culture
Manon at the Royal Opera House: a voluptuous romp translated to the Belle Epoque
Opera’s ultimate problem-child heroine returns to the Royal Opera House in a production somewhat lacking in warmth.
By Alexandra Coghlan
20 January

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