Ivan Hewett is The Telegraph’s Classical Music Critic and an author whose works include Music: Healing The Rift, a personal history of modern music. He has been involved in music as a composer, ...

Julia Agrippina or Agrippina the Younger was born November 6th in the year 15 C.E. Among classists, she was considered the most powerful and ruthless women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and yet many ...

Experience Handel’s black comedy of intrigue and impropriety in this production from David McVicar set in the present. Joyce DiDonato stars as the cunning title character with Harry Bicket at the ...

It is a popular saying in theater that "dying is easy, comedy is hard." In Boston Lyric Opera's (BLO) "Agrippina," the actors have to do both. Fortunately for audiences, they do it well. The opera is ...

While Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea takes place within the tyrannical reign of the Emperor Nero, Handel’s Agrippina, written 60 years later, charts the lead-up to the mean fiddler’s accession ...

Not that there isn't much splendid singing and playing to enjoy. Maybe it's even appropriate that excess is the keynote of Joyce DiDonato's Agrippina, fierce to the point of insanity in getting her ...

The Machiavellian antics of the eponymous empress in Handel's opera — intent on elevating her son Nero to the throne, the better to order affairs for herself — are rich in comic potential. James ...

The story of Agrippina has all of these aspects in abundance, and opened, by pure chance, on the day the Labour Party Conference opened and a day before the Supreme Court judgment on the PM's attempt ...