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Arguably the leading British countertenor, Iestyn Davies is known for his roles in operas from Handel to Thomas Ades, and on the recital stage in repertoire from Porpora to Nico Muhly. In a break during rehearsals for Handel’s Rodelinda at English National Opera, Iestyn talked to Tom about his almost-career in a pop band, how he learnt to be a soloist through his training with the conductor George Guest in the choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, his love of comedy and how that influences what he does on stage and his views on the current state of classical music.

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Photo: ©Benjamin Ealovega

Hans Werner Henze’s 1952 opera Boulevard Solitude is a modern retelling of the Manon Lescaut story. Manon and Armand are in love – but can their love survive when a world of sex, drugs and crime intrudes on their happiness? Henze’s opera is a vision of post-war Europe combining jazz, 19th century operatic and 20th century musical styles. Tom travelled to Cardiff to see the first night of Welsh National Opera’s new production and reviews the opera with the critic Paul Griffiths.

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Photo: Sarah Tynan as Manon Lescaut © Johan Persson

On Saturday 8th March the Â鶹Éç Symphony Orchestra celebrates the music of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos at the Barbican Centre in London. Villa-Lobos was thrown out of the Paris Conservatoire twice and took as much from his experience as a café musician as he did from his beloved Bach. His music blends birdcalls, church bells, Brazilian folk songs and European classical music. Tom assesses Villa-Lobos’s musical legacy with the composer’s biographer Simon Wright, the Brazilian conductor Celso Antunes and the guitarist John Williams.

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In 1908 Ralph Vaughan Williams spent three months in Paris studying with Maurice Ravel. Ravel was so impressed by his pupil that after Vaughan Wiliams’ departure he actively sought to arrange performances of his music in France, and the two composers became close friends. The British Library is home to a collection of letters from Ravel to his English counterpart (any correspondence the other way is yet to be discovered) which reveals their musical and personal relationship between 1908 and 1919. Tom looks at the original letters with the musicologist Stephen Johnson, and discovers a French side to the composer viewed so often as quintessentially English.

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