Alexandra Coghlan

1 month ago | inews.co.uk | Alexandra Coghlan

Abel Selaocoe isn’t so much a cellist as a magician. The South African musician is on a neon-lit stage in Camden – lights, microphones, crowd. He starts to play and suddenly we’re in a forest – bird calls, twigs cracking underfoot, leaves rustling and rain starting to drip, drip. There’s no digital trickery.

2 months ago | thetablet.co.uk | Alexandra Coghlan

Heidi Stober is a blazing force in the title role. From Act I’s flirtatious good-time-girl to Act III’s imperious queen she’s alert not only to the shifting sands of character but also to distinct public and private selves – converging inexorably as the piece progresses. Is this a meditation on displacement, the refugee crisis, on the impermanence of political institutions and insubstantiality of sectarian division?

2 months ago | inews.co.uk | Alexandra Coghlan

“Don’t worry, it’ll take more than that to shake them up.” The after-dinner revelation of incestuous child-rape is the centrepiece of Thomas Vinterberg’s cult film Festen. It’s a bold choice for the Royal Opera House mainstage treatment – or it would be for anyone other than Mark-Anthony Turnage, king of in-your-face operatic confrontation: Greek tragedy composed in musical expletives and great smears of orchestral colour.

2 months ago | theartsdesk.com | Alexandra Coghlan

Who’s in and who’s not – on the secret, the joke, the relationship, the family, the club? That’s the fulcrum of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ ingeniously simple Figaro for English National Opera. A white box and a row of doors supply the only set to speak of for a production less interested in the entrenched tensions of upstairs-downstairs than the shifting alliances and fragile coalitions of a household in flux.

2 months ago | inews.co.uk | Alexandra Coghlan

A year is an awfully long time for any festival to run, so you can forgive Kings Place’s Earth Unwrapped series if it strays a little from its forest and mountain paths along the way. With some clever conceptual footwork, this concert of choral classics by the Aurora Orchestra and the BBC Singers could just about claim a toe-hold in the topic, but the real theme was altogether less abstract and more interesting: pieces you know, in versions you don’t.