CLASSICAL&OPERA

If music be the food of love, play on... Yet are music and love such ideal bedfellows? This thought might occur when looking into what's on offer this coming Valentine's Day.

Musically, it is doomed love that often prevails. Take the London Concert Orchestra's evening of Valentine's Day Love Classics in London's Barbican Hall. It kicks off with the overture from Verdi's Force of Destiny, an opera about ill-fated passion if ever there was one; it ends with the lover killing the heroine's brother in a duel, the brother stabbing the sister to death before he dies, and the lover throwing himself into a ravine. Then comes Bizet's Carmen Suite; a flirtatious gypsy jilts her corporal, so the spurned Don Jose gets the daggers out to do what a man must do. Then there's Tchaikovsky's Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet - well, we all know what happened to them... Plus Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto, used so effectively in Brief Encounter (!) and Ravel's Bolero, which featured inBlake Edwards's film 10 about a middle-aged man pursuing a bimbo before seeing the error of his ways and returning to his wife.

Or what about a full-blooded romantic opera? Covent Garden offers Wagner's stirring Lohengrin, in Elijah Moshinsky's acclaimed staging. When wife Elsa innocently asks the wrong questions of her new grail knight husband, mayhem and sorrow break out.

Maybe one could try Puccini's Madama Butterfly in Moldavian Opera's production at Cambridge's Corn Exchange; bastard woos Japanese geisha, impregnates her, ditches her, and returns after a few years with his new wife to collect his son, all resulting in poor Butterfly's suicide.

A more purely musical manifestation of love might come from The Romantic Violin. In Nottingham's Djanogly Recital Hall, Madeleine Mitchell plays Chausson's Poeme, Debussy's Sonata and the Sonata in A... by the never-married Brahms!