19 Oct 2006
Theodora
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14936-2411845,00.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14936-2411845,00.html
Geoff Brown at the Barbican [Times Online, 20 October 2006]
I looked around. No outsize broken bottles. No lethal injections on hospital gurneys. No baffling, maddening semaphore gestures. This was not Peter Sellars’s eccentric opera version of Handel’s oratorio Theodora; though the memory of that Glyndebourne landmark was hard to escape. Emmanuelle Haïm, Le Concert d’Astrée, and the soloists certainly kept it close in their minds: the performance was dedicated to the memory of the late mezzo Lorraine Hunt Lieberson — so searing and engulfing at Glyndebourne in the role of the heroine’s friend Irene.