Handel is now best known for his mighty oratorios. ‘Tis the season for Messiah. But he was late to that game, deep as he was into Italian opera, the blockbuster genre of the 18 th century and the one ...

But as a fully-staged piece, as The Grange Festival’s director Michael Chance reminded us after Saturday’s performance, Handel’s story of the fall of Babylon, the triumph of the Persian leader Cyrus, ...

Opera: Puccini’s La Boheme and Handel’s Belshazzar THE LAST place you would expect to find opera is at the Cock Tavern, a boozer in Kilburn High Road, north London.

After a deeply moving, finely sung Le nozze di Figaro and a gloriously staged, superbly cast Falstaff, this production of one of Handel’s finest oratorios confirms The Grange Festival as the star of ...

For my money, this is the bull’s-eye hit of the country-house opera season to date – a production of what Handel authority Jonathan Keates describes as “the most markedly dramatic of the oratorios”, ...