“Elvira, for whom Mozart reserved his gentlest, most compassionate music…” writes Michael Tanner (not pictured) in The Spectator. Really? Does no one use the qualifier “arguably” any more? 
Now, La Cieca is on board with the idea there are “universal” (in the sense that the universe consists of post-Baroque Western Europe) signifiers for “gentle” in music, but she is at a loss as to what qualities could make music sound indisputably “compassionate.” (She would further wonder what segment of Elvira’s music one could even disputably call compassionate: the Act 2 Trio perhaps, but what else?)

Your doyenne also takes exception to the critic’s repeated attempts at reading the mind of conductor Mark Wigglesworth, who, Tanner insists, “seems finally to rebel against the staging, and prolongs the pauses so immensely as to belong to a wholly different period and style of conducting.”

That staging, by the inexplicably re-employable Richard Jones, sounds perfectly dreadful, at least if we can trust Tanner’s account of it, which, under the circumstances…