Erica Jeal

LONDON (The Guardian) — Who’s the hotter property in the opera world right now: Ted Huffman the librettist and director of zeitgeisty new works? Or Ted Huffman the director of streamlined, impactful productions of the classics? That second reputation is enhanced by his Royal Opera main stage debut, a new staging of Tchaikovsky ’s “Eugene Onegin.”

This was billed as a launch, even though Chromatica Orchestra is essentially a rebranding of the Bath Festival Orchestra – which was itself relaunched by the violinist and conductor Peter Manning in 2021.

Rachmaninov’s first symphony was a joy-filled highlight but Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s thoughtful interpretation of Shostakovich’s second cello concerto glowed too in an evening of exhilarating music-making

The London Symphony Orchestra’s Conductor Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas celebrated his 80th birthday with an authoritative but restrained account of Mahler’s Second with soloists Alice Coote and Siobhan Stagg

Three years ago, when Michael Tilson Thomas announced that he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, few thought that he would be back at the LSO to celebrate his 80th birthday.

Right from the start of this concert it was clear that we were in for more of the kind of superlative music-making we have come almost to take for

Composer Richard Dubugnon has given colourful life to previously unknown songs by the great French author’s youngest child, whose life descended into tragedy

The darkness of Shostakovich’s Symphony No 13 and Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw had a haunting modern resonance

ENO has several times tried to attract another bolt of the Gilbert and Sullivan lightning that brought the company Jonathan Miller's hit 1986

Gilbert & Sullivan stalwarts Richard Suart and John Savourin ensure that English National Opera’s staging buckles your swashes; and, as apprentice pirate Frederic, William Morgan is genuinely funny