Fun & fresh: flute/voice & guitar duo, Emily Andrews & Francisco Correa talk improvisation & collaboration on their new disc of Stephen Goss's music

Emily Andrews & Francisco Correa during the recording of From Honey to Ashes

Later this month, the Deux Elles label is issuing a two-disc set of music by composer Stephen Goss for flute and guitar performed by the husband and wife duo, guitarist Francisco Correa and flautist / mezzo-soprano Emily Andrews. In late 2024 I chatted to Stephen Goss about the triple album out, Landscape and Memory (also on Deux Elles) issued in celebration of Stephen's 60th birthday [see my interview] and it turns out that both Emily Andrews and Francisco Correa were performing on that album. Francisco has also collaborated with Stephen several times, including performing Stephen's guitar concerto in Colombia and Francisco's first disc on Deux Elles, Winterbourne, featured Stephen's Winterbourne Preludes.

The new disc, From Honey to Ashes, features Stephen's music for flute and guitar, including From Honey to Ashes from 2007, La Catedral Sumergida written in 2024 for the duo and Stephen's Welsh Folksongs in arrangements that date from across Stephen's career from 1988 to 2025; a total of nearly 90 minutes music in all. Both Emily and Francisco enjoyed collaborating with Stephen on the disc, finding he gave them great flexibility to perform. Yet the recording process felt like a collaboration: they were a trio, only with one member (Stephen) not actually performing. Both Emily and Francisco commented that it was a fun way to work and there is a sense that all three voices are heard on the disc, that of Stephen, Emily and Francisco.

Continuing where Handel left off: Opera Settecento's completion of Handel's Titus L'Empereur at London Handel Festival was a terrific showcase for some of the composer's lesser-known arias

Handel/Renioult/Duarte: Titus l'Empereur; Steffen Jespersen, Rachel Redmond, Chiara Hendrick, Hugo Hymas, Lucija Vaarsic, Edward Grint, Francis Gush, Opera Settecento, Leo Duarte; London Handel Festival at St George's Church, Hanover Square
Reviewed 5 March 2026

Handel's tantalising unfinished, unrealised operatic fragment used as the starting point for a Racine-inspired opera showcasing some of Handel's lesser-known arias in engaging and involving performances 

During the 1731/32 season, Handel began a new opera, titled on the manuscript Titus l'Empereur. Only the overture, three scenes including two arias were completed. Handel seems to have abandoned the work and the material was reused in his next opera Ezio (which was delivered late). 

Having given us a whole sequence of Handel's pasticcios, Leo Duarte and Opera Settecento turned to Titus l'empereur for their latest project at the London Handel Festival. On Thursday 5 March 2026 at St George's Church, Hanover Square, they performed a 'new' Handel pasticcio, Titus l'empereur with new recitatives by Pierre-Antoine Renioult and arias from Handel's operas (mainly pre-1732) chosen by Leo Duarte. Countertenor Steffen Jespersen was Titus (emperor of Rome), soprano Rachel Redmond (queen of Palestine, betrothed to Titus) was Berenice, mezzo-soprano Ciara Hendrick was Antioco (king of Comagène and in love with Berenice), tenor Hugo Hymas was Paolino (a confidant of Titus), Lucija Varsic who won the audience prize at last year's Handel Singing Competition was Dalinda (a confidante of Berenice), baritone Edward Grint was Oldauro (a Roman tribune), and countertenor Francis Gush was Arsete (a confidant of Antioco).

Handel's libretto for the putative Titus l'Empereur has not survived, but it seems to have been intended as an adaptation of Racine's 1670 play Bérénice. Given Handel's use of French in the title (despite the opera being in Italian), commentators suggest that Racine's play was being adapted directly and that the halting of work was caused by the librettist not being up to the task. Bérénice is in fact a relatively strange work to be considered for adaptation for an Italian opera. The entire play is taken up with the complexities of Titus and Berenice's relationship when he becomes emperor but discovers the Roman people do not want a foreign queen, add in his friend Antioco's unspoken love for Berenice and you have a complex triangle. But that is it. There is no subplot. It is worth bearing in mind that when Handel set the Alceste story in his opera Admeto the librettist introduced an entire subplot that is not in Euripides and not in Gluck's Alceste.

Opera Settecento's solution was to enlist the help of Professor Patrick Boyde in creating a libretto out of Racine's play, which was then translated into Italian by Matteo Dalle Fratte and the recitative set by Pierre-Antoine Renioult in Handelian style. Leo Duarte chose the arias, focusing on the lesser known music from Handel's operas pre-1732 including some that had never been performed. The result did exactly what pasticcios were often intended to do, to showcase music. We had arias from Amadigi, Floridante, Giulio Cesare, Lucio Silla, Ottone, Rinaldo, Scipione, Tamerlano and of course the original ones from Titus l'Empereur which found their way, in altered form, into Ezio. For the more nerdy amongst us, it was a shame that the programme was not able to give us more context for this music. So that, for instance, at a climactic point in Act Two Berenice sings 'Piangero la sore mia' from Giulio Cesare, but it definitely was not the well-known version of the aria. [see Leo Duarte's comment on my Facebook post for a wonderfully full explanation of the origins of the arias].

With one exception, arias were sung with their original texts which is something that may not have happened in Handel's day but which is more understandable in our present musicologically conscious age. 

Whether Racine's Bérénice was the idea vehicle is a point in question. Handel may have indeed been right. The final opera as performed in St George's Hanover Square might have been called 'Titus the ditherer'. Or, given that the plot happens almost simultaneously with that of Mozart's opera, The Dithering of Titus!

Applications open for The Cumnock Tryst's 2nd International Summer School for Composers with Sir James MacMillan & Brett Dean

Dumfries House where The Cumnock Tryst's 2nd International Summer School for Composers takes place

The Cumnock Tryst's 2nd International Summer School for Composers will run from 22 to 28 August 2026 at Dumfries House. The course will be led by The Cumnock Tryst’s Founder and Artistic Director, Sir James MacMillan, and acclaimed Australian composer and violist, Brett Dean, and for the first time The Cumnock Tryst is partnering with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (RSNO), who will provide an octet of musicians to work alongside the composers throughout the week.  

The inaugural course in 2024 attracted composers from across the UK, Europe, North America and China. The 2026 course will offer eight selected composers an exceptional opportunity to develop their craft throughout the week under the guidance of MacMillan and Dean as well as giving participants the invaluable experience of hearing their works shaped and rehearsed by professional orchestral musicians in real time. 

Sir James MacMillan commented: "The Cumnock Tryst is committed to encouraging the composers of today at all levels, from the very young in our East Ayrshire home to advanced international students at the beginning of their careers. The course also signals The Cumnock Tryst’s intentions to amplify our international standing and impact in the world of contemporary music."

Te course will culminate on Friday 28 August in a public performance of the new works at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall’s New Auditorium at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, presenting the eight compositions created during the course, performed by the RSNO ensemble.

The course is open to composers aged 18 and older. There is no maximum age limit, reflecting The Cumnock Tryst’s commitment to making the course as inclusive and accessible as possible. Applications should be submitted via the Cumnock Tryst website 

‘Somewhere further North’: has an authentic voice from England’s ‘living centre of music’ survived in Andrew Downes?

Andrew Downes (1950-2023)

During 2026 Prima Facie is releasing three albums celebrating the choral works of the late Andrew Downes conducted by David Trippett. 

The first disc is released this month (March 2026) and features the premiere recording of Andrew Downes’ A St Luke Passion alongside his sacred choral music performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices conducted by David Trippett. In this guest article, David Trippett considers Andrew Downes's legacy.

Recent calls to ‘level up’ appear to have aged badly. The political slogan of the 2019 general election was short lived, but its consequences left the fate of English National Opera in the balance, even as it sought to champion left-behind bastions of culture outside London (via a £4.8B fund allocated to ‘maintaining, regenerating, or creatively repurposing existing cultural … assets’).  For decades, cultural historians have been suspicious of centre/periphery models – noting their hidden assumptions about hierarchy, homogeneity, and national prioritisation. In the event, the levelling-up fund was quietly retired (in 2022), exposed as so much hocus-pocus. Few would question the degree to which London’s musical institutions have drawn the lion’s share of investment in the arts, so the idea that musical activities outside the capital are somehow lesser lingers stubbornly. Exceptions abound (I hear you shout!), yet the very word provincial still carries a telltale hint of condescension.

In 1903, Elgar felt the need was the other way around. In a letter to The Musical Times he judged that the real engine of musical growth in England lay outside the capital. ‘Some day’ he mused, ‘the press will awaken to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North.’

Mosaic Seasons presents Music of Our Time at Bechstein Hall

Mosaic Seasons was founded in 2023 by composer Tatiana Svetlova as a classical music festival based in the South of France and Monaco. The festival envisions envisions a creative dialogue between music, poetry, art, and dance, and its Music of Today series focuses on contemporary music. Svetlova is now expanding the reach of the festival to London and on 14 March 2026 Mosaic Seasons presents Music of Our Time at Bechstein Hall. Pianists Edna Stern, Evelyne Berezovsky, and Louis-Victor Bak will perform music by Silvina Milstein, Geoff King, Tatiana Svetlova, Edna Stern, and George Benjamin.

The programme opens with a pairing of Silvina Milstein’s Piano Phantasy after Mozart K. 475 and Mozart’s Fantasia No. 4 in C minor, K. 475. Milstein’s piece transforms Mozart’s Fantasia into a rhapsodic exploration of tonality. Geoff King's David in Hastings is the third movement of his suite family photos which was written as a companion to Schumann's Carnaval.

Audiences will hear two works by Tatiana Svetlova that blend playfulness with reflective depth. Sonnets No. 4 and 5 on the Theme of Bach’s Chaconne represents her own reflections on Bach's chaconne. Madonna and Child (for Gaudi’s La Pedrera) is a meditative homage to the architect Antoni Gaudi, who wanted to create the sculpture of Madonna and Child on the roof of La Pedrera in Barcelona, but the developer refused this plan. 

Edna Stern will perform three of her own compositions: Prelude without a C/do, Etude “La disparition d’après Perec” without E/mi, and Kidnapped: 7.X.2023. These pieces are inspired by Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition (a novel written without the letter E) and his poems that systematically suppress a letter. They explore this systematic absence through musical language. 

The evening concludes with George Benjamin's Shadowlines, sequence of six canonic preludes written for Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

Full details from Bechstein Hall website. 

The Norfolk & Norwich Festival, which evolved from the old Norfolk & Norwich Triennial, blazes a cultural trail for the East Anglian region

Norwich Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus who perform Walton's Belshazzar's Feast at this year's Festival

By far the largest arts festival in the East of England and the fourth largest in the UK, the 2026 Norfolk & Norwich Festival runs from Friday 8 to Sunday 24 May offering a grand cultural feast to include a performance of Walton’s magnificent Belshazzar’s Feast by the Norwich Philharmonic Society. 

Without a shadow of doubt, the Norfolk & Norwich Festival, one of the oldest music and arts festivals in England established in 1772 to raise funds for the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital, has a glorious and illustrious past of attracting major international soloists and orchestras which, I’m pleased to say, continues to this very day. 

However, the festival has moved on over the years thus becoming a triennial event in 1824 rotating between the cities of Birmingham and Leeds much in the same way as the Three Choirs Festival rotates to this very day between the cathedral cities of Hereford, Worcester and Gloucester. 

And from 1988, the festival has been held on an annual basis and, therefore, each year presents a host of international performers working alongside emerging talent and homegrown East Anglian artists in an expansive and engaging programme featuring not only classical and choral music but also taking in drama, dance and film with the literature and visual arts side of the festival ever growing. 

A charity-funded organisation supported by Arts Council England and Norwich City Council with generous support coming from a multitude of sponsors and donors, the festival also offers a year-round programme of creativity and culture for children, young people and their communities like no other. 

This year’s edition not only takes over the fine city of Norwich for 17 wondrous and action-packed days but spreads out for the first time into Norfolk with events taking place at Wells-next-the-Sea, Lowestoft, King's Lynn, Great Yarmouth, Sheringham, Diss and Swaffham thereby transforming the county into a hive of cultural activity.  

Norwich Cathedral Choir (Photo: Bill Smith / Norwich Cathedral)

Double, Double Toil & Trouble: the recorder quartet Palisander explore 900 years of music inspired by the mystical and magical

Double, Double Toil & Trouble : Palisander 
Reviewed 24 February 2025

An engaging look at music for recorder inspired by the mystical and magical spanning 900 years from Hildegard of Bingen through to the winner of the BBC Radio 3/National Centre for Early Music for the 2021 Young Composers’ Award

Having given us a debut disc broadly inspired by the idea of tarantism, the latest disc from recorder quartet, Palisander (Tabea Debus, Lydia Gosnell, Miriam Monaghan & Caoimhe de Paor), Double, Double Toil & Trouble is equally imaginative. With repertoire spanning some 600 years, the disc is inspired by the mystical and magical. 

There are modern versions of traditional pieces alongside music by Hildegard of Bingen, Diego Ortiz, Cipriano de Rore, Maddelena Casulana, Anthony Holborne Sweelinck, Bach, Tartini, and a suite from Purcell's The Fairy Queen, plus Kepler's Planets by Miriam Monaghan who plays with the group, and the winner of the BBC Radio 3/National Centre for Early Music for the 2021 Young Composers’ Award (18-25 Category), Kagura Suite by Delyth Field.

The Tempest: Vache Baroque collaborates with Out of Chaos theatre company to present a 17th century semi-opera remade

Pergolesi's L'Olimpiade at Vache Baroque in 2024 (Photo: Michael Wheatley) - [see my review] 

The 17th-century English tradition of the dramatick opera (often called semi-opera nowadays) remains a fascinating challenge for modern performers with much fine music attached to long and seemingly unworthy texts. Semi-operas ran in London from roughly 1673 to 1712, in other words from the Restoration to the establishment of regular Italian opera. Though the best known name attached to the genre is Henry Purcell, music could often be provided by a selection of composers. 

For more on semi-opera see my article The Invention of English Opera: the surprising history of opera in 17th century England - from masques to dramatic-opera 

In 1674, there was The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island with a libretto by Thomas Shadwell (who became Poet Laureate in 1689) based on John Dryden and William Davenant's adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest (this was a period when few Shakespeare plays were performed unaltered). The music by was provided by Matthew Locke, Giovanni Battista Draghi and Pelham Humfrey, a fine trio of composers. 

Towards the end of semi-opera in London (the large-scale ones were getting too expensive), The Tempest was revived again. This time in 1712, still with Shadwell's text but with new music that was long attributed to Henry Purcell but may be by John Weldon. In 1701 Weldon took part in, and won, the competition to set Congreve's libretto The Judgement of Paris to music and his music for this was recorded for the first time in 2025 by Julian Perkins and the Academy of Ancient Music [see my review].

Now for its Summer 2026 festival, Vache Baroque is joining forces with the theatre company Out of Chaos (artistic director Paul O'Mahoney) to present The Tempest, a semi-opera inspired by Shakespeare's play and featuring music by Henry Purcell, Matthew Locke, Pelham Humfrey, and others including a full Purcell masque, along with pieces by other European composers of the period, shanties, and improvisations. The Vache's landscape setting with its lake and trees makes it an ideal venue for the venture. The Tempest will be directed by Paul O’Mahony (of Out of Chaos), choreographed by Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster and designed by Caitlin Mawhinney. Jonathan Darbourne will direct the Vache Baroque Band with a cast of singers including Stephanie Hershaw, Isabelle Peters, Camilla Seale, Conor Prendiville and Ross Cumming alongside actors from Out of Chaos.

Still on-theme, Water Music will feature a concert of water-themed works (but not Handel's famous one) featuring Sophia Prodanova (violin) and Isabelle Peters (soprano) plus sound recordist Chris Watson with music by Purcell, Handel, Vivaldi and Maria Martines (her cantata La Tempesta from 1778). Jonathan Darbourne directs the Vache Baroque Band and Singers.

Full details from the Vache Baroque website. 

 

Rossini's William Tell, Previn's Streetcar, Golijov's Ayre and more: Boston Lyric Opera celebrates 50 years

Boston Lyric Opera (BLO), New England’s largest and most enduring opera company, is in celebratory mood. Founded in 1976, 2026 is its 50th year and 2026/27 is its 50th season. And recent seasons have seen the company experience significant growth. During its 2024/25 Season, BLO welcomed more than 22,000 audience members — its highest figures in more than a decade. Between 2019 and 2025, audience members aged 18 to 34 years old have tripled in number and audience racial diversity has increased by 70 percent.

This month BLO opens its Opera + Community Studios, a renovated and repurposed space that will serve as a rehearsal centre and administrative headquarters, and operate as a shared creative hub available to regional arts organizations and community groups. The opening is celebrated with a new production of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde reimagined and staged by BLO Artistic Associate Anne Bogart, and conducted by BLO's music director David Angus, from 20 to 29 March 2026.

The 50th season launches in October 2026 with a new production of Rossini's Guillaume Tell, conducted by David Angus, directed by Vita Tzykun and David Adam Moore​, with George Gagnidze, Konu Kim [a former Jette Parker Young Artist at Covent Garden] and Anya Matanovič. Other operas during the season include André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, conducted by Daniela Candillari​ and directed by Patricia Racette, the soprano who is now director of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis [she was Giorgetta in Covent Garden's 2016 revival of Puccini's Il trittico, see my review, and sang the title role in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at ENO in 2015, see my review]; a semi-staged performance of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades with the BLO Chorus being joined by the Tanglewood Festival Chorus; and a new production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro featuring Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha as the Countess.

A new community opera by composer Carlos Simon and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith had been commissioned by BLO and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Telling the stories of Bostonians and featuring dozens of community organisations, the opera will premiere at Symphony Hall, Boston in May 2027.

Other events at  Opera + Community Studios include celebrity gala featuring tenor Michael Fabiano, and a staging of Osvaldo Golijov’s genre-defying work, Ayre, that draws on Jewish, Arab and Christian traditions to illuminate their connections -- and their tensions. Arye stars soprano Ailyn Pérez who made her debut with BLO as Susanna in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro during the 30th anniversary season.

Full details from the company's website. 

Vital, alive & compelling: Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno from David Bates & La Nuova Musica at Wigmore Hall

Handel: Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno - Jeanine De Bique, Polly Leech, Christopher Lowrey, Nick Pritchard, La Nuova Musica, David Bates - Wigmore Hall (Photo: image capture from Wigmore Hall live stream)

Handel: Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno; Jeanine De Bique, Polly Leech, Christopher Lowrey, Nick Pritchard, La Nuova Musica, David Bates; Wigmore Hall
Reviewed 28 February 2026

Vivid musical presence and compelling drama make this concert performance of Handel's first oratorio an engrossing evening, vividly alive and vital playing combining with vocal beauty and sense of drama 

Handel's first oratorio, Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Disillusion) had a remarkably long life. Premiered in Rome in 1707 during Handel's youthful Italian trip, the work not only provided source material for many of Handel's subsequent works, but resurfaced in London in 1737 (and 1739) in a revised and expanded version, still in Italian, as Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità and finally was recast in English as The Triumph of Time and Truth in 1757 as a stop-gap because the blind and ageing Handel was no longer capable of writing new work.

It is a remarkably exuberant piece. Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili's highly intelligent libretto might be somewhat conceptual with conversion of Beauty from a yearning for worldly enjoyment personified by Pleasure to an aspiration to more secure rewards revealed by Time and Disillusion, but in execution Pamphili gave Handel sufficient character and drama that the composer was to create a quasi-opera. It is worth bearing in mind that the work was written at a time when there was no opera in Rome. The piece works as a psychological study, as demonstrated by Jacopo Spirei's staging at Buxton in 2024 which successfully recast the oratorio as family drama. But it also contains music which demonstrates Handel at his best. Italy had clearly been liberating for him and his musico-dramatic experiments in his cantatas paid dividends in works like Il trionfo.

David Bates and La Nuova Musica treated us to Handel's original Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno at Wigmore Hall on Saturday 28 February 2026. Soprano Jeanine De Bique was Belezza, mezzo-soprano Polly Leech as Piacere, countertenor Christopher Lowrey as Disinganno and tenor Nick Pritchard was Tempo. David Bates directed the 17 players of La Nuova Musica from the harpsichord.