A rehearsal room in Opera Australia's Surry Hills headquarters. Bass-baritone Andrew Collis is standing on a table glowering at his castmates. He has a prop gun in his hand. He looks threatening. But ...

It wasn't Theodora, but the Carnegie Hall audience, who went wild on Sunday at the performance by the English Concert of Handel's rarely heard THEODORA. With the modern rebirth of interest in ...

Katie Mitchell's staging of Handel's great oratorio relocates it from the fourth-century to a bleak modern embassy – with remarkable results Telegraph Opera Critic, Nicholas Kenyon, is an author and ...

Theodora had its first performance at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden – predecessor of the Royal Opera House – in 1750. As an oratorio, it was presented in concert with no staging: Handel could never ...

It is difficult to know what to commend most strongly – the ravishing beauty of Valda Wilson and Christopher Lowrey's duets (Theodora and Didymus), the thrilling choral singing in Handel's superbly ...

Katie Mitchell’s new production of Handel’s Theodora comes bristling with warnings of sexual violence and exploitation. It was also recently revealed that the production team had availed themselves of ...

Back in 2018 Jonathan Cohen and his period group Arcangelo brought Theodora to the Proms. Distant and correct in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, it never quite caught fire. Five years on and Cohen ...

Katie Mitchell’s modern-day staging of Handel’s oratorio is probing but problematic. The cast, however, is one of the finest ever assembled for the work Handel considered Theodora the greatest of his ...

The brave Christian noblewoman Theodora is arrested and thrown into prison because she refuses to honour the Emperor, and threatened with a fate worse than death – as a sex worker for the President ...

Handel’s historical oratorio Theodora is one of his most sublime works. And the fact that Katie Mitchell’s new production is brandished as state-of-the-art feminism, boasting two top-of-the-range pole ...

Art has an ability to conflate the past, the present and the future; it does not follow the strictures of linear history. Pinchgut Opera’s Theodora, a George Handel oratorio of 1750, was the most ...