Richard Bratby

Funny, faithful and inventive: Scottish Opera’s Barber of Seville reviewed

Plus: the most articulate, consistently beautiful playing of any full-time UK orchestra in recent years

This was everything you could want from a Barber of Seville. Image: James Glossop

A violinist friend in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra used to talk about an orchestra’s ‘muscle memory’; a collective instinct that transmits itself, unspoken and unconscious, among the members of the ensemble. The occasion was a return visit from Sir Simon Rattle, a good decade and a half after he’d left Birmingham.

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