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.
Year: 2017
Premiere Recording: Mayr’s Telemaco nell’isola di Calipso (1797)
No sooner had I drafted my review of
Simon Mayr’s Medea in Corinto,
Aida opens the season at ENO
Director Phelim McDermott’s new Aida at ENO seems to have been conceived more in terms of what it will look like rather than what the opera is or might be ‘about’. And, it certainly does look good. Designer Tom Pye – with whom McDermott worked for ENO’s Akhnaten last year (alongside his other Improbable company colleague, costume designer Kevin Pollard) – has again conjured striking tableaux and eye-catching motifs, and a colour scheme which balances sumptuous richness with shadow and mystery.
La Traviata in San Francisco
A beautifully sung Traviata in British stage director John Copley’s 1987 production, begging the question is this grand old (30 years) production the SFO mise en scËne for all times.
The Judas Passion: Sally Beamish and David Harsent offer new perspectives
Was Judas a man ‘both vile and justifiably despised: an agent of the Devil, or a man who God-given task was to set in train an event that would be the salvation of Humankind’? This is the question at the heart of Sally Beamish’s The Judas Passion, commissioned jointly by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Philharmonia Baroque of San Francisco.
Choral at Cadogan: The Tallis Scholars open a new season
As The Tallis Scholars processed onto the Cadogan Hall platform, for the opening concert of this season’s Choral at Cadogan series, there were some unfamiliar faces among its ten members – or faces familiar but more usually seen in other contexts.
Stars of Lyric Opera 2017, Millennium Park, Chicago
As a prelude to the 2017-18 season Lyric Opera of Chicago presented its annual concert, Stars of Lyric Opera at Millennium Park, during the last weekend. A number of those who performed in this event will be featured in roles during the coming season.
A Verlaine Songbook
Back in the LP days, if a singer wanted to show some sophistication, s/he
sometimes put out an album of songs by famous composers set to the poems of one
poet: for example, Phyllis Curtin’s much-admired 1964 disc of Debussy and FaurÈ
songs to poems by Verlaine, with pianist Ryan Edwards (available now as a CD
from VAI).
Die Zauberflˆte at the ROH: radiant and eternal
Watching David McVicar’s 2003 production of Die Zauberflˆte at the Royal Opera House – its sixth revival – for the third time, I was struck by how discerningly John MacFarlane’s sumptuous designs, further enhanced by Paule Constable’s superbly evocative lighting, communicate the dense and rich symbolism of Mozart’s Singspiel.
‘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.