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BALLET ICONS GALA at the London Coliseum – 15 February 2026, 7pm
BALLET ICONS GALA 2026 celebrates 20 years at the London Coliseum with a dazzling anniversary tribute to the art of ballet honouring distinguished ballet personalities and bringing awareness to the environmental crisis
Celebrate the magic of live ballet – tickets are available through the London Coliseum website here or via the London Coliseum box office.
Gregor Tassie talks to visual artist Grégoire Pont
One of the unexpected highlights of the George Enescu International Festival was a Sunday matinee concert of French music for children at the charming Odeon Hall (review here). If the music by Poulenc and Ravel was well known, the artwork by the French illustrator Grégoire Pont was a pleasant surprise.
Elgar’s choral masterpiece
Firmly rooted in the belief that The Kingdom is the greatest of Elgar’s oratorios, David Temple, Music Director of Crouch End Festival Chorus and Hertfordshire Chorus, has long been a champion of the work. With its beautiful, gentle conversational sections, astonishing dramatic passages, iridescent colours and some of Elgar’s finest orchestral writing, Temple believes that ‘it is a gem from the first note to the last’.
The two choirs, under Temple, will join forces with soloists Francesca Chiejina, Dame Sarah Connolly, Benjamin Hulett and James Platt for a performance at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on Thursday 29 January 2026.
‘A born artist. Everything he touches transforms into something new’
The prestigious Concertgebouw Prize will be presented on 16 March 2026 to the Hungarian conductor Iván Fischer
Waterperry Opera Festival announces 2026 headline productions: La bohème and The Elixir of Love
Two celebrated masterpieces to be performed in English, created by critically acclaimed creative teams
Waterperry Opera Festival is delighted to announce the two major headline productions for its 2026 season: Puccini’s La bohème and Donizetti’s The Elixir of Love, both presented in vivid and accessible English translations. Following the Festival’s record-breaking 2025 season, these cornerstone operas will take centre stage next summer, performed against the backdrop of Waterperry’s iconic gardens and continuing the Festival’s mission to bring imaginative, world-class opera to audiences of all ages and backgrounds.
Chicago Symphony spotlights Julia Bullock in the upcoming world premiere of Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared
The 12th International Opera Awards – the opera world’s most prestigious accolade – lit up the Stavros Niarchos Hall of the Greek National Opera (GNO) in Athens tonight in a landmark celebration of the global opera community. Live-streamed worldwide, the event underscored the artform’s enduring power to inspire audiences and transform communities across borders.
Questions on the road for conductor Dalia Stasevska
Ukrainian-born Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska (currently principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra) will be returning to conduct the Cleveland Orchestra 20-23 November in a program that features Dvořák’s ‘New World’ Symphony and La Noche de los Mayas by Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas. Busy schedules prohibited the conductor and Seen and Heard International critic Mark Sebastian Jordan from finding an ideal time to speak in person, so they devised a correspondence interview that would allow Stasevska to work on her answers whenever she found a stray moment between family, study, rehearsals, performances and travel.