Welsh National Opera’s wheel of destiny has rolled into Birmingham this week, with Verdi’s sprawling tragedy, La forza del destino, opening the company’s ‘Rabble Rousing’ triptych at the Hippodrome.
Author: Claire Seymour
A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Royal College of Music
The gossamer web of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is sufficiently insubstantial and ambiguous to embrace multiple interpretative readings: the play can be a charming comic caper, a jangling journey through human pettiness and cruelty, a moonlit fairy fantasy or a shadowy erotic nightmare, and much more besides.
Robert Carsen’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream returns to ENO
Having given us Christopher Alden’s strangely dystopic production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2011, English National Opera (ENO) has opted for Robert Carsen’s bed-inspired vision for the latest revival of the opera at the London Coliseum.
Turandot in San Diego—Prima la voce
The big musical set pieces in Turandot require voice, voice, and more voice, and San Diego Opera has gifted us with a world-class cast of singing actors.
Dialogues de CarmÈlites at the Guildhall School: spiritual transcendence and transfiguration
Four years have passed since my last Dialogues des CarmÈlites, and on that occasion – Robert Carsen’s production for the ROH – heightened dramatic intensity, revolutionary insurrection (enhanced by an oppressed populace formed by a 67-strong Community Ensemble) and, under the baton of Simon Rattle, luxuriant musical rapture, were the order of the day.
Songs for Nancy: Bampton Classical Opera celebrate legendary soprano, Nancy Storace
Bampton Classical Opera’s 25th anniversary season opens with a
concert on 7th March at St John’s Smith Square to celebrate the
legendary soprano Nancy Storace.
Of Animals and Insects: a musical menagerie at Wigmore Hall
Wigmore Hall was transformed into a musical menagerie earlier this week, when bass-baritone Ashley Riches, a Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and pianist Joseph Middleton took us on a pan-European lunchtime stroll through a gallery of birds and beasts, blooms and bugs.
Hugo Wolf, Italienisches Liederbuch
Nationality is a complicated thing at the best of times. (At the worst of times: well, none of us needs reminding about that.) What, if anything, might it mean for Hugo Wolf’s Italian Songbook? Almost whatever you want it to mean, or not to mean.
Mortal Voices: the Academy of Ancient Music at Milton Court
The relationship between music and money is long-standing, complex and inextricable. In the Baroque era it was symbiotically advantageous.
A newly discovered song by Alma Mahler
It is well known that in addition to the fourteen songs by Alma Mahler published in her lifetime, several dozen more – perhaps as many as one hundred – were written and have been lost or destroyed.