Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana was written in 1953 for celebrations around the Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, to whom the opera is dedicated. It had its first performance at the Royal Opera House on 8 June 1953, in the presence of The Queen then just 6 days into her reign. The centenary in 2013 of Britten’s birth prompted this new Royal Opera production, in which director Richard...

These recordings are with two different orchestras (Mahler 1st with the Chicago Symphony and the 8th with the London Philharmonic). Tennstedt's live performances are much better than his studio versions of the same works, and it's wonderful to watch him coaxing what he wants from the players. Even though he conducts from the score rather than from memory, he always seems to be directly connected t...

Jonathan Miller set his well-known production of The Mikado, staged for the English National Opera, in a British seaside resort of the 1920s. The result, complete with a chorus of gentlemen of Japan as cartoon-like British peers, emphatically underscores the Englishness of the satire. The occasional non sequiturs, like a bunch of gentry dressed for Ascot and singing in Japanese, are loonily fun, a...