Month: July 2019

If you need a sweet bonbon to accompany the canapÈs and champagne on a sparkling summer evening, then Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s one-act trifle is a safe bet, especially if presented, as at Opera Holland Park by director John Wilkie and designer takis, as a confection of pink and purple, and performed by two splendid singing actors.

This year’s Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance offered a veritable operatic smˆrgÂsbord, presenting sizable excerpts from operas ranging from Gluck to Saint-SaÎns, from Mozart to Debussy, by way of some Italian masterpieces, courtesy of Rossini and Verdi.

In a rank order of suicidal depressives, Federico – the ProvenÁal peasant besotted with ‘the woman from Arles’, L’arlesiana, who yearns to break free from his mother’s claustrophobic grasp, who seeks solace from betrayal and disillusionment in the arms of a patient childhood sweetheart, but who is ultimately broken by deluded dreams and unrequited passion – would surely give many a Thomas Hardy protagonist a run for their money.

The young American conductor Karina Canellakis made history as the first woman to conduct the First Night of the Proms last night (19 July 2019) as she conducted the BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall with soloists Asmik Grigorian (soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo-soprano), Ladislav Elgr (tenor), Jan MartinÌk (bass) and Peter Holder (organ) in Zosha Di Castri’s Long is the Journey, Short Is the Memory (the world premiere of a BBC commission), Antonin Dvo?·k’s The Golden Spinning Wheel and Leoö Jan·?ek’s Glagolitic Mass.

No one would pretend that Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto for Mozart’s Die Zauberflˆte would go down well with the #MeToo generation. Or with first, second or third wave feminists for that matter.