Bach: Suite No. 3 in D major Britten: Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings Mozart: Symphony no 39 in E flat Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, leader Amin Merchant Kirill Karabits: Conductor Robert Murray: Tenor Nicholas Fleury: Horn THE players of the BSO certainly deserved a good sit down after this inspiring and energising concert. What had…

GILES Havergal’s brilliant adaptation of Graham Greene’s Travels with my Aunt is once again filling Salisbury Playhouse, this time in a witty and fast-paced new production by Amanda Knott for her Creative Cow company. It was with this show that Rupert Goold burst onto the scene at Salisbury (where he then became associate director with…

THE second play in the 2016 Shakes­peare at the Tobacco Factory season, at the Bedminster headquarters until 30th April and then touring, is the difficult “comedy” All’s Well that Ends Well. The beautiful, kind and intelligent Helena, foster daughter to the Countess of Rossillion, is in love with her foster brother Bertram, one of the…

ALAN Bennett would have been giggling all the way home from Bath Theatre Royal had he overheard the conversation I did at the end of the performance of A Question of Attribution. The woman behind me declared “I thought the first one [An Englishman Abroad, the first of the Single Spies pairing] –  Bennett’s one…

ESTABLISHED in 2006, the Wincanton-based chamber choir Spectra Musica  has given many concerts throughout the region, with imaginative programmes ranging from Palestrina to Porter and Bach to Bernstein. The Spring concert, under the masterly control of Musical Director Peter Leech, took place in the glorious surroundings of St. Michael’s Church, North Cadbury, with its brilliantly…

EUGENE O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey into Night is regarded as one of the greatest of all American plays, flaying the fabric of a family in the course of one intense day. Mary Tyrone was once a romantically pious Catholic schoolgirl with dreams of the Sisterhood until she met matinee idol James, an Irish actor…

MICHEL Tremblay’s famous 1971 play A toi, pour toujours, ta Mary-Lou, has been translated and relocated by Michael West for its UK premiere, on at the Ustinov Studio in Bath until Saturday 30th April. Four members of a family talk. Two of them are dead. This is a play deep-rooted in poverty and repressive Catholicism,…

I HAVE said before that I would travel a long way to see anything performed by BODS, having been thrilled by their Rent and Hairspray, and even impressed with The Witches of Eastwick, a somewhat weaker work. So when I heard that they were taking on one of the 20th century’s musical classics, I was…

THE centenary of the First World War has been an opportunity for many untold stories to be told, forgotten heroes to be remembered and the many roles of women to be celebrated. But few stories are more extraordinary and few women more remarkable than Dorothy Lawrence, a young journalist from Salisbury who made her way…

IBSEN’S Hedda Gabler, considered one of the greatest European plays of the 19th century, has had a radical re-working by Irish playwright Brian Friel. First seen in Dublin in 2008, it is at Salis­bury Playhouse until 2nd April, only the second English production (the first was at the Old Vic starring Sheridan Smith)  Friel has…