Romeo and Juliet, Rinaldo and Armida, RamadËs and Aida: love thwarted by warring countries and families is a perennial trope of literature, myth and history. Indeed, ‘Love and war are all one,’ declared Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote, a sentiment which seems to be particularly exemplified by the world of baroque opera with its penchant for plundering Classical Greek and Roman myths for their extreme passions and conflicts. English Touring Opera’s 2017 autumn tour takes us back to the Baroque and back to the battle-lines.
Month: October 2017
Gluck’s OrphÈe et Eurydice at Lyric Opera of Chicago
Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s OrphÈe et Eurydice opened the 2017–18 season at Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Michelle DeYoung, Mahler Symphony no 3 London
The Third Coming ! Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted Mahler Symphony no 3 with the Philharmonia at the Royal Festival Hall with Michelle DeYoung, the Philharmonia Voices and the Tiffin Boys’ Choir. It was live streamed worldwide, an indication of just how important this concert was, for it marks the Philharmonia’s 34-year relationship with Salonen.
King Arthur at the Barbican: a semi-opera for the ‘Brexit Age’
Purcell’s and Dryden’s King Arthur: or the British Worthy presents ‘problems’ for directors. It began life as a propaganda piece, Albion and Albanius, in 1683, during the reign of Charles II, but did not appear on stage as King Arthur until 1691 when William of Orange had ascended to the British Throne to rule as William III alongside his wife Mary and the political climate had changed significantly.
Elder conducts Lohengrin
There have been dozens of capable, and more than capable, recordings of Lohengrin. Among the most-often praised are the Sawallisch/Bayreuth (1962), Kempe (1963), Solti (1985), and Abbado (1991). Recording a major Wagner opera involves heavy costs that a record company may be unable to recoup.
Anne Schwanewilms sings Schreker, Schubert, Liszt and Korngold
On a day when events in Las Vegas cast a shadow over much of the news this was not the most comfortable recital to sit through for many reasons. The chosen repertoire did, at times, feel unduly heavy – and very Germanic – but it was also unevenly sung.
The Life to Come: a new opera by Louis Mander and Stephen Fry
It began ‘with a purely obscene fancy of a Missionary in difficulties’. So E.M. Forster wrote to Siegfried Sassoon in August 1923, of his short story ‘The Life to Come’ – the title story of a collection that was not published until 1972, two years after Forster’s death.
‘Never was such advertisement for a film!’: Thomas Kemp and the OAE present a film of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the Oxford Lieder Festival
Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier was premiered at the Dresden Semperoper on 26th January 1911. Almost fifteen years to the day, on 10th January 1926, the theatre hosted another Rosenkavalier ‘premiere’, with the screening of a silent film version of the opera, directed by Robert Wiene – best known for his expressionistic masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. The two-act scenario had been devised by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the screening was accompanied by a symphony orchestra which Strauss himself conducted.
Premiere Recording: Mayr’s Telemaco nell’isola di Calipso (1797)
No sooner had I drafted my review of
Simon Mayr’s Medea in Corinto,
Peter Kellner announced as winner of 2018 Wigmore Hall/Independent Opera Voice Fellowship
Independent Opera (IO) was very present at the Wigmore Hall last week. On Thursday 5 October, IO announced 26 year old Slovakian bass Peter Kellner as the winner of the 2018 Wigmore Hall/IO Voice Fellowship, a two-year award of £10,000 plus professional mentoring from IO and the Wigmore Hall. A graduate of the KonzervatÛrium Koöice Timonova and the Mozarteum University Salzburg, Peter is currently a member of Oper Graz in Austria where later this season he will sing the title role of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Colline in Puccini’s La bohËme.