Listening to Moritz Eggert’s Caliban is the equivalent of
watching a flea-ridden dog chasing its own tail for one-and-half hours. It
scratches, twitches and yelps. Occasionally, it blinks pleadingly, but you
can’t bring yourself to care for such a foolish animal and its
less-than-tragic plight.
Month: April 2017
New opera Caliban banal and wearisome
Two rarities from the Early Opera Company at the Wigmore Hall
A large audience packed into the Wigmore Hall to hear the two Baroque rarities featured in this melodious performance by Christian Curnyn’s Early Opera Company. One was by the most distinguished ‘home-grown’ eighteenth-century musician, whose music – excepting some of the lively symphonies – remains seldom performed. The other was the work of a Saxon who – despite a few ups and downs in his relationship with the ‘natives’ – made London his home for forty-five years and invented that so English of genres, the dramatic oratorio.