JANUARY is no time for summaries of the 1935 season, but it’s no risk to record that the loudest composition of the year was William Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast,” produced by the Schola Cantorum in ...

It was bold thinking by the Barbican and William Christie to programme Handel's oratorio Belshazzar at the height of the annual Messiah season. In spite of its dramatic Babylonian subject matter, ...

If you enjoyed Friday’s first night of the Proms, here is a reminder of Sibelius’s sequence of incidental music for Belshazzar’s Feast, which was followed by Walton’s far noisier choral masterpiece.

Which is a shame, because it’s a rare delight these days to see Christie perform in London with the group that played such an important part in reviving the fortunes of the early music movement. While ...

Iron Maiden have released a new video in which singer Bruce Dickinson, wearing a shirt for “Belshazzar’s Feast,” invites fans to that very event: “July the fifteenth. Rain or shine, heaven or hell, ...

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, ...

Abbott, who is widely respected as an interpreter of Handel’s music, brought out the various affects of the work wonderfully, with a clear, controlled conducting style. The orchestra played with ...

Understatement can be a powerful tool. It was a defining factor in this RSNO season finale, either in the music itself – a tasteful and balanced package of Sibelius, Elgar and Walton – or in the ...

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 ...

With stage directions written into its original libretto, Belshazzar (four stars) has the reputation of being the most overtly theatrical of Handel’s oratorios. Yet its first 90 minutes seems ...