‘Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.’ One imagines that countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford have taken heed of the words of the English clergyman Robert Burton –…
Month: October 2022
Ghosts, guilt and giggles: two contrasting Pocket Operas at Wexford Festival Opera
The opening weekend of Wexford Festival Opera 2022 offered not just three operas on the main stage of the National Opera House, but also a lunchtime recital, pop-up events around…
Félicien David’s Lalla-Roukh at Wexford Festival Opera: a forgotten gem
On 23rd September 1876, the ‘Occasional Notes’ column in The Musical World reported that after a performance of the opera Lalla-Roukh by Félicien David (1810-76), one of the musicians made…
Operatic Shock Treatment: Salomé in Paris
A new production of Richard Strauss’s Salomé is playing at Paris’s Opera Bastille. Stage Director Lydia Steier, an American working mostly in Germany, has designed it to shock audiences. In…
Tristan und Isolde at Seattle
Seattle Opera has long championed the operas of Richard Wagner. Legendary impresarios Glynn Ross and Speight Jenkins – the latter, at 85, still cutting a dapper figure in the audience…
Halévy’s La tempesta opens the 71st Wexford Festival Opera
“Be not afeard,” Caliban reassures the comic conspirators, Stephano and Trinculo, “This isle is full of noises,/ Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.” Indeed, the whole…
The English National Opera announces departure of Stuart Murphy, CEO, in September 2023
The English National Opera (ENO) today announces that Stuart Murphy, current Chief Executive of the ENO and London Coliseum, will leave the company in September 2023. His five year contract…
Dialogues des Carmelites in San Francisco
Poulenc’s masterpiece (1957), Camus’ La Chute (The Fall) Nobel Prize for Literature (1957), Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street (1954). San Francisco Opera…
Patricia Petibon blurs musical and theatrical boundaries at Oxford Lieder
Back in August, when I spoke to Sholto Kynoch about this year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, he told me that one of the things he was most looking forward to, as…
Danielle de Niese to perform in English National Opera’s UK premiere of It’s a Wonderful Life
This November, ‘opera’s coolest soprano’ (The New York Times Magazine) and Australian-American actress Danielle de Niese makes her ENO operatic debut at the London Coliseum, opening the festive period with…