Big day at Liceu. The Barcelona theatre hosted the European premiere of Antony & Cleopatra, the new opera by John Adams, premiered in San Francisco in September 2022 and soon to travel to Palermo and New York. The Barcelona performances had the added attraction of the presence on the orchestral podium of the composer himself, who was performing his work for the first time. In San Francisco the musical direction was in the hands of Eun Sun Kim, the theatre's chief...

Handel’s oratorio Theodora is unusual among his compositions in that it has created more of a splash in the modern day than it ever did during his lifetime. It premiered at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden on 16 March 1750 but ran for just three performances and was only revived once in 1755. Although the fact there had been an earthquake a week before the premiere meant that some of the composer’s usual patrons had fled the city, the real reason for the work’s...

When Robert Schumann wrote his song cycle Dichterliebe in 1840 he originally composed twenty songs. Four of these were then cut before publication to produce the sixteen that we know today. No contemporary records reveal exactly why he decided to exclude them, so composer Bernard Foccroulle and librettist Martin Crimp took this as their starting point to intervene at the points where the songs were removed, and to extend the song cycle, to produce Zauberland. With the original sixteen...