Oliver Mears’s powerful but flawed staging of Handel’s biblical oratorio boasts very fine singing and performances, with Jennifer France’s Iphis and Allan Clayton’s Jephtha standouts Jephtha is Handel ...

What would you sacrifice to gain a victory? While this question may be at the forefront of many of our minds in light of the conflict in the Middle East, director Oliver Mears’s new production of ...

The new season opens with Music of the Baroques first performance in over three decades of Handels final oratorio. Working furiously while his eyesight was failing, Handel tells the story of Jephtha, ...

The resonances of this tale from an Israeli point of view are interesting. Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, also thwarted by an angel, leads to the symbolic founding of the Jewish nation. Jephtha’s ...

‘Gloomy’. That’s the word. The story of Jephtha in the Book of Judges isn’t a barrel of laughs. Pushed into leading the Israelites in battle against the Ammonites, Jephtha makes a bargain: Yahweh will ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. The story of Jephtha is, as the Handel scholar Ruth Smith points out, taken from the oldest account of the fight for possession of ...

The State of Israel is at war with its neighbours. No, this is not the World News but a Biblical story that forms the plot of Handel's Jephtha. This is rarely seen, partly because it was not ...

On this showing, Wake-Walker belongs to the hands-off, non-interventionist school of directing. You can see his argument – let the music speak for itself. But in that case why not perform the oratorio ...

Handel's dark masterpiece was delivered with taut conducting, blazing conviction in the choruses and wonderful solo singing Jephtha, Handel's last oratorio, is his darkest, most troubling masterpiece.

The story of Jephtha is, as the Handel scholar Ruth Smith points out, taken from the oldest account of the fight for possession of land in the Middle East. While that adds more than a frisson in the ...