It isn't every day that one can legitimately hail a first night without having seen it, but I can do it for David McVicar's production of Handel's Agrippina which opens tomorrow at the Coliseum. The ...

Kate Lindsey sings an excerpt from Nerone's Act III aria in the final dress rehearsal. Production: Sir David McVicar. This early Italian opera of Handel was a success that secured the composer's ...

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 ...

After the exhilarating triumph of “Powder Her Face” and the more modest but undeniable delights of “The Cunning Little Vixen,” it really did seem as though the West Edge Opera could do no wrong. Then ...

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 ...

Machinations, mind games and unabashed ambitions are rampant in the court of Claudius, Emperor of Rome. No one is more adept at manipulating the political lackeys than his clever wife, Agrippina, ...

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, ...

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Rome’s hardball politics were off-limits to women, yet this great-granddaughter of Augustus won power for herself and her son, Nero, who would later have her murdered. Agrippina’s portraits often ...

Joyce DiDonato gives one of her finest performances in Barrie Kosky’s witty and unnerving staging of Handel’s opera of political manipulation in ancient Rome ‘The ambitious are bound by no laws,” we ...