The Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London
Premiering Roderick Williams’ song cycle about Black Tudors alongside songs from the period itself, the rising-star soprano was elegant, while the uber-lutenist poured her solos like liquid

Deep inside the Tower of London, the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula was built for the people who lived and worked in the fortress during Henry VIII’s reign. Thomas More is buried there; so is Anne Boleyn. It’s a coolly atmospheric place. For the opening concert of this year’s Spitalfield’s music festival, it was more than a venue: the Tower’s many “ghosts” inspired the programme performed by rising-star soprano Nardus Williams and uber-lutenist Elizabeth Kenny.

There were three short pieces attributed to Henry VIII and songs with texts by Robert Devereux, who became one of the Tower’s many prisoners. Courtly grace crossed such political divides: seated next to Kenny, Williams’s vocal lines were elegantly shaped but unshowy, her ornamentation featherweight, her diction crystalline. Kenny’s brief solo turns poured like liquid, musical lines barely troubled by the percussive quality of plucking.

Royal Opera House, London
The men prance about in fake moustaches while the women roll their eyes in this turbo-charged revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s riotous take on Mozart’s opera

‘Is that the one with the mobile phones?” someone asked me ahead of the latest revival of Jan Philipp Gloger’s 2016 production of Così fan Tutte. That’s the one, but those phones are just one cameo in a staging that rampages around time and place with riotous energy and accessories galore. Although Da Ponte’s libretto about male naivety and female faithlessness theoretically unfolds in a single 24-hour period, the Aristotelian unities don’t trouble us here.

Act One alone hurtles from a 21st-century night at the Royal Opera (still clutching their red programme books, the opera’s two couples have just watched … Mozart’s Così fan Tutte) to a farewell scene at a Brief Encounter-ish station, to a bar populated by a kind of Rat Pack of aggressively flirtatious men wearing thin black ties and porkpie hats, to a Technicolor Eden where the now-disguised Ferrando and Guglielmo pretend to poison themselves under an apple tree sporting a prominent serpent.