Stephen Gadd News Today

AS a suitable setting for reflections on the Easter story, Dorchester Abbey would be hard to beat. Benson Choral Society and West Forest Sinfonia were massed in...

Her husband said that her work had become 'all-consuming.' Our condolences to her family, friends, and colleagues during this extremely difficult time.

HENLEY Choral Society held its sell-out festive concert in St Mary’s Church on Saturday. The junior and senior sections of Henley Youth Choir joined them ...

Super show, a little slow at first, but blossoming into an escapist entertainment that can be enjoyed as much in the 2020s as it was in the 1880s

The Victorian penchant for the Gothic and the macabre is well known. It was seen in everything from architecture to popular novels – the blighted ruin created as a folly in aristocratic gardens, the grand guignol madness of the stage heroine, the séance as an after-dinner entertainment. Paranormal researchers looked for evidence of ghosts and even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most logical of sleuths, Sherlock Holmes, believed in fairies. It was inevitable then, given this ubiquity,...

Cecilia Stinton's new production of Rigoletto for Opera Holland Park updates its setting from Renaissance Mantua to the Bullingdon Club in the 1920s. And, while I was a little uncertain about this device at first – how would the dark power plays pan out, the roles of Duke and Jester make sense – it soon became clear that it was going to work. The Duke is still, well, a Duke and his jester becomes a veteran of the Great War, medals pinned to his chest, with a gammy leg and, wearing a bow...

Bullying, sexism, corruption, initiation ordeals and debauched behaviour. No, it’s not another government inquiry into the antics of the elite, but Opera Holland Park kicking off the 2023 season by way of a new and thought-provoking production of Rigoletto.

Cecilia Stinton’s new staging provides fresh insight into this problematic canon opera

A handsome season opener doesn't quite stab where it counts, opera review by Alexandra Coghlan

In an engaging but problematic staging, the Duke’s court is relocated to interwar Oxford, with Alison Langer’s beautifully sung Gilda a standout