Press reviews

“What gives the show a touch of international class is Richard Farnes’ conducting, a classic Verdian combination of tender lyricism and dramatic largesse.”
Financial Times - Otello / Opera North

“I cannot recall any recent performance of Traviata conducted with such nuance, dramatic heft and sheer thrill than that undertaken here by Richard Farnes. There was such depth in the opening of the prelude, that bizarre blend of weight and weightlessness that only a few conductors can bring. The besieged ENO Orchestra sounded galvanised, the strings velvety, the woodwinds rounded, the brass punchy: an aural delight. This alone makes the production worth seeking a ticket.”
Bachtrack - La traviata / English National Opera

“In the pit the Philharmonia Orchestra is in electrifying form under Richard Farnes, a musician alive to every comic twist and romantic turn in Verdi’s masterly score. You will rarely hear the intricate ensembles delivered with such rapport between pit and stage, nor the drama paced so effectively, nor orchestral detail spring out so vividly.
Times - Falstaff / Garsington Opera

“And what a performance! The undoubted architect of its success was conductor Richard Farnes - the company’s former music director, returning after his sensational Ring Cycle in 2016. He coaxed glowing, luminous playing from the ever-attentive Opera North Orchestra, whose stamina never faltered from first note to last. Farnes’ conducting was alive to every nuance of the drama. His reading was fleet, yet never perfunctory, energised, yet never rushed. The ebb and flow of the work was perfectly judged while the transformation music in the outer acts had an inexorable pull I’ve not experienced in a live performance before. Quite simply, this was Wagner conducting of the highest order, and by far the best conducted Parsifal I’ve heard in this country.”
MusicOMH - Parsifal / Opera North, Royal Festival Hall London

“And the first thing to say about the Royal Opera’s superb new production is that under Richard Farnes’s baton this score is delivered as if it is chamber music writ large: every nuance, every ethereal wisp and ominous discord is wonderfully delineated. You will not encounter a finer performance of this autumnal masterpiece.”
Times - Death in Venice / Royal Opera, London

“The musical performance is outstanding. Richard Farnes demonstrates what Puccini conducting is all about - colour, pace, rubato and the knack of creating a line through the music’s profusion of melody. Farnes must also take credit for his ensemble’s strength in depth, showcased here in numerous small roles and fabulous orchestral playing.”
Financial Times - La fanciulla del West / Opera North

“Richard Farnes conducted with an electric pace that made the mystery of the story seem urgently real. More than anything, this was a performance that stressed the sheer quality of the score itself - something of which (Sir Colin) Davis, who believed strongly that the music was boss and the conductor the servant, would have been proud.”
Guardian - The Turn of the Screw / London Symphony Orchestra, Barbican Centre, London

“A massively enhanced Orchestra of Opera North, complete with steerhorns, Wagner Tubas and six harps, packed the steep tiers of Leeds Town Hall and yet never overpowered a single singer. In the opera house orchestral volume would be kept naturally in check by the enclosure of a pit; here the feat of balance was all down to Farnes. He micro-managed the sound swell throughout every bar of Wagner’s sprawling score, discreetly reining it in under certain singers but letting rip with a glorious surge during non-vocal set-pieces like Siegfried’s Rhine Journey and Funeral March. This was conducting of the utmost distinction, and Farnes’s departure in two years’ time will be a huge loss to the company.”
What’sOnStage - Götterdämmerung / Opera North

“To enable Konwitschy’s vision to come through as searingly as possible is Richard Farnes’s conducting, which inspires his musicians to miracles in the pit. Rarely have I heard the ENO Orchestra - or any other pit orchestra, including Covent Garden or major houses abroad - play with such unanimity of both attack and purpose. Rarely have the gossamer string textures felt so suspended and yet so potent; rarely have wind and brass emerged as such superbly balanced units. Farnes’s tempi, too, have just the right feel about them, just enough space for the final tragedy to speak, just enough velocity for the energy of the party to fly (and yet, he projects a suspicion of darkness under the festivities). The ENO Chorus was on stellar form, complimenting the true excellence of the orchestra. Both consired to bring Farnes’s conception to fruition - and one was left in no doubt of Verdi’s genius.”
Seen & Heard International - La traviata / English National Opera

“Orchestrally, it is fabulous: Richard Farnes’s conducting, at once detailed and visceral, is outstanding.”
Guardian - Otello / Opera North

“From the fierce, throbbing start to the sparing final pages, and with a vitality that never drowns his singers, the conductor Richard Farnes gives us one of the great musical accounts of Janacek’s penultimate opera.”
Sunday Telegraph - The Makropoulos Case / Opera North

“The chief medium of this alchemy was the conductor Richard Farnes, relatively new to this repertory, but already a master of its narrative ebb and flow.”
Daily Telegraph - Das Rheingold / Opera North

“Factor in a glorious orchestral sweep courtesy of an ENO Orchestra clearly inspired by Richard Farnes, a Verdian of the first rank and the leading British opera conductor of his generation (probably), and the stars were aligned.”
Bachtrack - Rigoletto / English National Opera

“Nevertheless, having Richard Farnes’s orchestra in full view was an inestimable benefit. His dozen years as music director, which culminated in a full Ring Cycle in 2016, meant he had no need to cajole his players; they followed him with near-religious devotion. Textures were everywhere transparent, none more so than in the Good Friday music. There was a masterly crescendo at the healing of Amfortas’s wound, but it was the moments of calm, with magical swells and diminuendos, that really hit home. Farnes’s attention to detail was immaculate, each occurrence of the “Dresden Amen”, for example, seeming to carry slightly different significance.”
Martin Dreyer/Charles Hutch Press - Parsifal / Opera North

“Richard Farnes’s thrillingly visceral conducting energises music that under a lesser baton can seem weary and meager.”
Daily Telegraph - Death in Venice / Royal Opera, London

“Less can be more when it comes to Wagner, and Opera North’s Ring - now on its second instalment….continues to enthrall and amaze. First and foremost this is because its musical standards remain consistently high….Richard Farnes’s conducting is sensational in its sweep, detail and understanding.”
Guardian - Die Walküre / Opera North

“Richard Farnes conducts with wonderful vitality and the orchestra plays with all the creepy volatility that’s seeded into the score. If Farnes sets a fairly cracking pace. however, the former Opera North music director also skilfully supports the singers, giving them the space to let Verdi’s arias bloom.”
Times - Il trovatore / Royal Opera, London

“Musically, the opera is in the most trustworthy of hands. From the start, Richard Farnes again showcased his credentials as one of this country’s best operatic conductors. The sombre brass prelude alone tells you that here is someone who knows exactly what he wants. The crisp idiomatic vigour of the playing he secures repeatedly highlighted the freshness of Verdi’s scoring, but Farnes never swamps the singers in more lyrical moments.”
Guardian - Rigoletto / English National Opera

“It helps here that the conductor is Richard Farnes, long-time music director of Opera North until 2016 and a paragon of the role. Farnes is good at everything; he inhabits every musical idiom I’ve ever heard him conduct. From the first bar he locates the freightedness of this music, those etiolated high chords that return at Violetta’s death packed as full of nostalgia and out-of-reach happiness as one of those moments in Schubert where a distant door opens and strange tragic music drifts in from another world. The orchestral score of Traviata, wracked with pain and full of Violetta’s hopes and feverish excitement, is where her soul is to be found, and Farnes finds it here.”
Robert Thicknesse in The Critic - La traviata / English National Opera

“This is Opera North back on top form, with the conductor undoubtedly the star of the show: how long before Richard Farnes is recognised as a national treasure?”
Daily Telegraph - Otello / Opera North

“…the evening’s star is Richard Farnes, who conducts his orchestra with a finely judged sense of the work’s febrile modernist edge and urban restlessness: under his electrifying baton, the music reaches a white heat of intensity without blasting the singers or losing the plot.”
Daily Telegraph - The Makropoulos Case / Opera North

“The real hero of the evening, for my money, is the conductor Richard Farnes. He binds it into an unbroken totality, creating a superbly controlled long dramatic line, while at the same time extracting every detail of instrumental colour and making Britten’s thirteen instruments, superbly played, sound like every kind of orchestra from a gamelan up to the LSO. There were thrilling sonorities in this performance that I’ve never heard in a Britten chamber score, climaxing in the final scene of the first act where Quint and Miss Jessel close in on the children and Farnes generated a degree of tension that sent us out gasping for the summer air.”
The Arts Desk - The Turn of the Screw / Garsington Opera

“There were two stand-out stars, though. The first was non-vocal. The conductor, Richard Farnes, recently brought the Opera North Ring to the Royal Festival Hall to great, and rightful, acclaim. Farnes clearly inspires his orchestras. Textures were expertly delineated, ensemble was always tight. But more, there was a feeling of revealing the underlying greatness of the piece.”
Seen & Heard International - Il trovatore / Royal Opera, London

“Every quirk in Janáček’s orchestral writing is highlighted in Richard Farnes’s incandescent conducting.”
TheArtsDesk - The Makropoulos Case / Opera North

“Richard Farnes had an absolutely sure control over pace. With this vast orchestra coming straight at you from the stage there was a series of shattering experiences akin to the feeling of being pressed into the back of one’s seat by hurricane blasts. At the end of the performance, as I recovered from the feeling of having been through a mangle, I realised that the experience of being forced to concentrate so much on the music had led me to regard the score as an even greater masterpiece than I had previously thought.”
Seen & Heard International - Elektra / Opera North

“Farnes has done many fine things at Opera North, but the pacing of this 150-minute sweep of music, his care about balance (not a single vocal line is overwhelmed) and the sumptuousness of the orchestral textures - all this constitutes a massive achievement.”
Times - Das Rheingold / Opera North

“Nor does the conductor Richard Farnes have much to fear from big-name comparisons. With his orchestra playing incandescently, he proved himself a born Wagnerian, with a natural sense of the score’s pulse and flow as well as its architecture. No crashing about, no over-inflated rhetoric: Farnes held a clear, taut musical line and never let the fortissimi go to his head.”
Daily Telegraph - Die Walküre / Opera North

“The opera is greatly conducted by Richard Farnes, who digs deep into its emotional world and whose understanding of its dramatic pace is matched by few. Playing and choral singing are both simply outstanding: it is genuinely tragic that ENO’s excellent orchestra and chorus face cuts and job losses in the near future.”
Guardian - La traviata / English National Opera

“And the whole drama was bathed in the molten glory of the Opera North orchestra under Richard Farnes - a soaring, caressing interpretation that occasionally erupted from below in massive nightmare surges, only to dissolve, miraculously, in woodwind playing of intense sweetness and expression. The chorus floated its benediction from the heights of the Grand Theatre in the final scene; this was a cumulative achievement that swept away any and all reservations, and one of the most completely satisfying operatic experiences that I can recall, at least recently.
Spectator - Parsifal / Opera North

“Conductor Richard Farnes made his Met debut and without doing anything unusual delivered a superb performance. The orchestra was bright, muscular and agile. Between the pit and the singers, this was as musically tight and precise an opening night as one has heard in recent seasons.”
New York Classical Review - Falstaff / Metropolitan Opera, New York

“The conductor’s control and pacing were unerring, his ear for balance impeccable and the playing of the orchestra - the strings soaring, the wind incisive, the brass rounded and imposing - consummate.”
Financial Times - Götterdämmerung / Opera North

“Under Farnes, Verdi has never sounded so gorgeous or stylish.”
Opera Today - Rigoletto / English National Opera

“Music Director Richard Farnes conducts with laser-like clarity, and the climaxes of the great choruses and interludes raise the roof - and the hairs on the back of your neck.”
Telegraph - Peter Grimes / Opera North

“Richard Farnes and the Philharmonia Orchestra treated Garsington’s perspex theatre to a regal interpretation of Verdi’s last opera. The plush sounds emanating from the pit felt like a gift for being good, while as ever with this conductor the interpretation never wavered from the ideal. Farnes made light of the score’s intricacies and projected its energy with a tireless sense of joy.”
WhatsOnStage - Falstaff / Garsington Opera

“If you closed your eyes, you noticed the poise and fluency of the delivery of the conductor, Richard Farnes. Puccini’s swellings of the heart, his catchings of breath and swaggering gestures, came billowing up from the pit.”
Independent - La bohème / Scottish Opera

“The conductor Richard Farnes keeps the score at boiling point throughout.”
Guardian - Otello / Glyndebourne Festival

“Richard Farnes’s orchestra was back where it wanted to be, the heart and motor of an astonishing performance. What I kept thinking about this band was: “They sound like Germans” - undemonstrative, serious, committed, intense, serving the music, beautiful….simply right, in the end, in a way that very seldom happens.”
The Critics’ Circle - Götterdämmerung / Opera North, Royal Festival Hall, London

“His rapport with the orchestra was obvious from the first bar, drawing some exemplary performances from players still winded by recent redundancy announcements.”
Observer - La traviata / English National Opera

“Richard Farnes, a young conductor making his auspicious ENO debut, showed himself entirely at home with Janáček’s quirky and tricky idiom, which has now come to seem so entirely natural.”
Music Web International - The Cunning Little Vixen / English National Opera

“He has total control of all that happens in the pit - the Opera North orchestra plays superbly for him - and every detail of Puccini’s lustrous score is at his fingertips, with each throb and flicker of its dramatic pulse vividly conveyed…..the quality of Farnes’s contribution is never in doubt.”
Guardian - Manon Lescaut / Opera North

“The stars, perhaps, are the Opera North orchestra under Farnes’ direction. His approach to tempi and pacing are what stood out most: a sense of pace and internal movement - but never pressing or rushing, allowing the score’s miraculous luminosity to grow and bloom. The final minute of Act 2 saw a remarkable excavation of Wagner’s orchestration, showing us just how rich it is, framed by startling interjections from timpani, with what felt like harder sticks than in traditional accounts. Playing throughout was pungent and heady, with ferocious attack from the strings, who gleamed throughout, and brass playing that was fulsome and rich though never brash and blaring.”
OperaWire - Parsifal / Opera North

“Farnes, Music Director from 2004-2016, has long established himself as a leading interpreter of Wagner and in this Parsifal he reminded us of his calibre from the very beginning, with a sprightly, carefully managed Prelude with its series of interlocking Leitmotifs signifying the main themes of compassion, fellowship, chastity, suffering, redemption and much else which might seep into an audience’s unconscious mind. In Act 3, the Good Friday Music could not have been more sublime, and the funeral ceremony of Titurel, with its loud bells and brass, inspired a kind of pleasurable fear.”
Bachtrack - Parsifal / Opera North

“For a start, its theatened orchestra and chorus are on top form under the direction of Richard Farnes - not only a wonderful Verdi conductor but someone who, if ENO is miraculously revived could build it into a terrific musical force again. The chorus singing is superbly pointed, while the orchestra produces extraordinarily febrile or pathos-laden textures, matching the intensity on stage.”
Times - La traviata / English National Opera

“Anyone who may have doubted Farnes’ ability to fill Gergiev’s glamorous shoes will surely have been astonished by the young British conductor’s authority in the Glyndebourne pit: his account of this extraordinary score was entirely appropriate to the scale of the 1000 seat theatre. Certainly, he whipped up an orchestral tempest in the opening scene, with the Glyndebourne Chorus and London Philharmonic Orchestra on electrifying form. And he paced the music naturally, at one with (Sir Peter) Hall’s lucid unfolding of the drama.”
Sunday Times - Otello / Glyndebourne Festival

“Richard Farnes again proved that he is outstanding among our younger opera conductors.”
Sunday Telegraph - Gloriana / Opera North

“Farnes’ Macbeth is among the best I have heard, on record or in the theatre.”
Seen & Heard International - Macbeth / Opera North

“The chorus is precise, the orchestra supple; Richard Farnes’s conducting moves the music seamlessly from the leanest of textures into fleeting passages of full-orchestral glow.”
Guardian - Death in Venice / Royal Opera, London

“Richard Farnes found a primordial wildness in the score that I never thought existed.”
Times - Peter Grimes / Opera North

“Last but not least, the conductor Richard Farnes, formerly of Opera North, conducts with total command and understanding.”
Daily Mail - Death in Venice / Royal Opera, London

“When Verdi conducting is done right, it looks so easy and inevitable - like chairing a meeting well - but all too often conductors make a mess or a meal out of it, and either lack momentum or drive the music too hard. Richard Farnes’s conducting is ideal, and the orchestra play like angels for him. Their eloquence and immaculate playing in the face of adversity are heartbreaking.”
Patrick Shorrock / Mark Aspen Theatre Critic page - La traviata / English National Opera

“The Glyndebourne Otello is a rip-roaring triumph, the sort of evening one hopes for and even expects from this house…..The chorus and London Philharmonic were stormy, silky and seductive as required. This says a very great deal for the conductor, Richard Farnes, who I thought wholly had the measure of the great work, launched it with a rendering storm and brought it to a conclusion with all passion spent and the listeners purged by pity and terror. A Shakespearian evening, in truth, and due in large measure to him.”
Sunday Telegraph - Otello / Glyndebourne Festival

“On its final outing at the Royal Festival Hall in London, several performances stood out as genuinely special, and none more so than that of the Orchestra of Opera North itself, under the baton of Richard Farnes. There was a lightness of touch that handed the music an ethereal quality, yet everything was so well balanced and all the lines delineated so perfectly, that the output felt as masterly as it did tender. This said, certain moments such as those in the Temple of the Holy Grail that feature the Knights, Voices, Boys and Youths (all performed here by the Chorus of Opera North), felt as overwhelming as they ever do, making the scene feel just as much like a spiritual experience for the audience as it did for the characters in the drama.”
Opera Online - Parsifal / Opera North, Royal Festival Hall, London