Bullock/ Tines/Appleby/Los Angeles Master Chorale & PO/Adams
(Nonesuch, two CDs)
The opera met with a mixed response on its 2017 premiere. After two reworkings, and with many of its original cast reprising their roles, this premiere recording is a rich and energetic mix

John Adams’s fourth full-length opera was first performed in San Francisco in 2017. Then the music of Girls of the Golden West played for almost three hours, but after two reworkings – the first for the European premiere in Amsterdam in 2019, the second for the concert performances in Los Angeles last year on which this recording is based – it runs for just over two. Like its predecessors, Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and Doctor Atomic, Girls of the Golden West is based on real historical events and characters, in this case in the California gold rush of 1849, as chronicled in contemporary documents and journals of the time, from which the director, Peter Sellars , assembled the libretto.

Reviews of the San Francisco premiere had been mixed; the opera’s sheer length and its discursiveness, which blurred the sense of narrative, were both criticised, but Adams’s cuts and revisions seem to have done a great deal to tighten the dramatic focus. The first act presents the socially and racially diverse community, black and white, Asian and Latin American, brought together by the hunt for gold in this fleeting frontier world, while the second shows the tensions that grew up between the miners and their followers, and their tragic results, culminating in the lynching of a Mexican woman who had killed the man who had tried to rape her. Everything is observed by “Dame Shirley”, the pen name of Louise Clappe, a doctor’s wife from Massachusetts who spent 18 months in the California mining camps and brought that world vividly and wittily to life in her letters home.

Trinity Buoy Wharf, London
Riveting performances underpin a gratifyingly meta version of Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, retold around a Docklands film shoot

The London Handel festival has always offered plenty of opportunities to hear the composer’s music in his own church, St George’s, Hanover Square. But this year, like last, the most interesting event takes audiences somewhere unfamiliar: to Trinity Buoy Wharf this time, an old storehouse on a windswept Docklands bank just across from the O2. As an optional extra you can even travel there by boat, serenaded by an oboe-bassoon quartet. As you prepare to disembark, the conceit of Jack Furness’s production begins to kick in. The charming onboard host turns out to be the assistant director of a film company, here to give us a gentle heads-up about his boss before we sit in on a shoot – for a film of Handel’s Aci, Galatea e Polifemo. He’s visionary but volatile, we’re warned. Things may get heated.

And they do, gratifyingly so, thanks to the riveting performances Furness gets from his cast – three singers, plus the actor Durassie Kiangangu as the assistant. The bullying director we’re warned about is Polifemo – a lustful cyclops in the mythical story Handel was retelling – and his victims are his two stars. The drama unfolds around and within the film shoot, in front of us and onscreen, via handheld camera. The film and a translation of the Italian text are projected on to a huge double door which, in a gesture that seems almost magical in context, slides open to let Galatea the sea nymph – or perhaps the singer playing her – walk out into the darkness, the water and the twinkling lights beyond.

Boulez’s 100th and Rattle’s 70th are among the highlights of the LSO’s new season with chief conductor Antonio Pappano in which British music is a strong thread. The orchestra also announced an £8m redevelopment of LSO St Lukes

The London Symphony Orchestra today announced its 2024-25 season , the orchestra’s first under its chief conductor Antonio Pappano. British music will dominate, with a new work by James MacMillan opening the season on 11 September and works by Bax, Elgar, Holst, Walton, Elizabeth Maconchy and Tippett threaded through the following nine months of concerts.

More of the UK’s greatest composers will feature in Conductor Emeritus Sir Simon Rattle’s two 70th birthday concerts in January 2025. Rattle will be joined by LSO Associate Artist Barbara Hannigan for the world premiere of George Benjamin ’s Interludes and Aria from his opera Lessons in Love and Violence, and Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new guitar concerto will be performed by US jazz guitarist John Scofield.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Trutschel / Contributor | Photothek )

Smaller web browsers are gaining traction in the European Union after the Digital Markets Act (DMA) started requiring designated gatekeepers like Google and Apple to make it easier to switch default web browsers on devices.

Previously, tech giants were able to lock users into setting their own browsers as defaults—or at least make it complicated to update the defaults—offering the majority of users their own browsing services for free while collecting data used for ad-targeting. This, the EU feared, kept users from switching to defaults that offered superior or more private web browsing experiences.

Reuters collected data from six companies, confirming that, when presented with a choice screen, many EU users will swap out default browsers like Chrome or Safari for more privacy-focused options. And because iPhones have a larger market share than Google-branded phones in the EU, Apple is emerging as the biggest loser, Reuters reported, noting that under the DMA, "the growth for smaller browsers is currently coming at the cost of Safari."

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The Swedish artist Lap-See Lam is drawing on the Cantonese operas of the 19th century to explore the ‘fiction’ of culture

Amid a polarising debate taking place in Sweden over what constitutes culture, the artist behind this year’s Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennale hopes her multilingual opera staged on a Chinese dragon ship will act as a sort of riposte.

Lap-See Lam, a Swedish artist with Cantonese roots, is leading the Nordic countries’ offering at the international exhibition, which opens on 20 April, with a multidisciplinary artwork.

Jonas Kaufmann, Anna Netrebko and Antonio Pappano pull off a buoyant La Gioconda; elsewhere, a fresh Verdi Requiem and a Byronic septuagenarian viola soloist made this a festival to remember

Riddled with paradox, La Gioconda (1876) was a triumph at its premiere for its Italian composer, Amilcare Ponchielli, but is now seldom staged. The music is hardly known but contains a ballet, the Dance of the Hours, so famous through appropriation and parody that Ponchielli’s name lives on. (Think of hippos en pointe in Walt Disney’s F antasia .) All praise to the Salzburg Easter festival for assembling an illustrious lineup for this four-act grand opera, led by the soprano Anna Netrebko and the tenor Jonas Kaufmann , conducted by Antonio Pappano .

They were joined by the all-Italian forces of the orchestra and chorus of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Rome, who displayed their affinity with opera – a departure from their usual concert hall activities – with buoyant and unerring skill, both in the pit and on stage. Pappano is Santa Cecilia’s conductor emeritus, after 18 years as music director. (His British successor, Daniel Harding , takes over next season.) The warmth of this established relationship was palpable, both in La Gioconda and in concerts they gave as resident ensemble elsewhere in the festival.

For centuries, they have been subversive speakers of truth to power – and a focus for our fears. Why do clowns provoke such strong emotions?

Perhaps more than other Shocks of the Old, today’s needs a content warning because much of humanity is scared of clowns. In 2022, of 987 respondents to the Fear of Clowns Questionnaire, or FCQ (yes, a real thing ) 272 (27.6%) reported “a fear of clowns, while 50 (5.1%) rated this fear as extreme”.

In a controversial ( with clowns ) 2008 survey of more than 250 children, every single one said they disliked clown decor in hospitals . “We found that clowns are universally disliked by children,” said the study lead, Dr Penny Curtis. “Some found them quite frightening and unknowable.”

Featuring awe-inspiring aerial antics, Welsh National Opera’s Death In Venice shows how innovative the art form can still be

Conversation about opera has become an increasingly cronky merry-go-round over the last few years, revolving not around art and imagination so much as money, elitism and whether or not the repertoire is refreshing itself at a rate that makes any significant contribution to a modern creative environment. Much of the latest discontent has focused on the forced move of the English National Opera (ENO) from its London redoubt – the Coliseum – to Manchester where, until its new home is built, it will do the rounds of existing venues.

So it is refreshing to find Welsh National Opera (WNO) out on the road with a revival that stares down many of the resulting anxieties, while reframing the underlying debates in a way that detractors of the art form would do well to heed. After opening its new season with an old repertory staple, Così fan Tutte, it is touring Benjamin Britten’s more challenging Death in Venice , about the fixation of an ageing writer for a beautiful young boy he spots in a Venice that is succumbing to a cholera epidemic. The opera itself is obviously not new. Based on a novella by Thomas Mann, it premiered just two years after Visconti’s famous 1971 film. But half a century on, social attitudes to the themes it addresses – gay love, obsessive desire, and the morally hazy relationship of artist to muse – have changed, giving a fresh resonance to its meditations.

Coliseum, London
A last-minute cast substitution added a remarkable gender twist to Bartók’s opera about marital disintegration

The first night of English National Opera ’s Bluebeard’s Castle (billed as a “concert semi-staging”, though there is considerably more to it than that) turned out to be unique, startling and completely unforgettable, thanks in no small measure to the unusual circumstances that surrounded it. Allison Cook, cast as Judith, withdrew from the performance late in the day because of illness. With only two hours’ rehearsal, Jennifer Johnston sang, not from the side of the stage, as one might expect, but as a costumed, albeit largely immobile presence within Joe Hill-Gibbins’s production. The role was acted, meanwhile, wonderfully well, by Crispin Lord, one of ENO’s staff directors, handsome yet androgynous in a white singlet and silk skirt, so that Bluebeard’s final partner, in a remarkable twist, effectively becomes his husband rather than his wife.

Bypassing at a stroke the perceived gender polarities that inform Bartók ’s examination of marital disintegration, the end result is at once strikingly erotic and profoundly unsettling, particularly within the context of Hill-Gibbins’s chillingly beautiful staging.