The courtly palace may have been opera’s first home but nowadays it gets out and about, popping up in tram-sheds, car-parks, night-clubs, on the beach, even under canal bridges. So, I wasn’t that surprised to find myself following The Opera Box down the shaft of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Thames Tunnel at Rotherhithe for a double bill which brought together the gothic and the farcical.
Author: Claire Seymour
Proms at Wiltons: Eight Songs for a Mad King
It’s hard to imagine that Peter Maxwell Davies’ dramatic monologue, Eight Songs for a Mad King, can bear, or needs, any further contextualisation or intensification, so traumatic is its depiction – part public history, part private drama – of the descent into madness of King George III. It is a painful exposure of the fracture which separates the Sovereign King from the human mortal.
A Prom of Transformation and Transcendence: RenÈe Fleming and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra
This Prom was all about places: geographical, physical, pictorial, poetic, psychological. And, as we journeyed through these landscapes of the mind, there was plenty of reminiscence and nostalgia too, not least in Samuel Barber’s depiction of early twentieth-century Tennessee – Knoxville: Summer of 1915.
The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief: Opera della Luna at Wilton’s Music Hall
Billed as the ‘First British Performance’ – though it had had a prior, quasi-private outing at the Roxburgh Theatre, Stowe in July – Opera della Luna’s production of Johann Strauss Jnr’s The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief (Das Spitzentuch der Kˆnigin) at Wilton’s Music Hall began to sound pretty familiar half-way through the overture (which was played with spark and elegance by conductor Toby Purser’s twelve-piece orchestra).
Glyndebourne perform La clemenza di Tito at the Proms
The advantage of Glyndebourne Opera’s performances at the BBC Proms is that they give us a chance to concentrate on the music making. And there was plenty of high-quality music-making on offer at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday 28 August 2017 when Glyndebourne Opera performed Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito.
Cadogan Hall and soprano Nazan Fikret present Grenfell Tower Benefit Concert
In the wake of the terrible fire at Grenfell Tower, the soprano Nazan Fikret decided to rally fellow performers and put together a concert to raise funds for those affected, and she has brought together a sensational line-up of both established and up-and-coming artists.
An Invitation to Travel: Christiane Karg and Malcolm Martineau at the Proms
German soprano Christiane Karg invited us to accompany her on a journey during this lunchtime chamber music Prom at Cadogan Hall as she followed the voyages of French composers in Europe and beyond, and their return home.
Dunedin Consort perform Bach’s St John Passion at the Proms
John Butt and the Dunedin Consort’s 2012 recording of Bach’s St John Passion was ground-breaking for it putting the passion into the context of a reconstruction of the original Lutheran Vespers service.
Collision: Spectra Ensemble at the Arcola Theatre
‘Asteroid flyby in October: A drill for the end of the world?’ So shouted a headline in USA Today earlier this month, as journalist Doyle Rice asked, ‘Are we ready for an asteroid impact?’ in his report that in October NASA will conduct a drill to see how well its planetary defence system would work if an actual asteroid were heading straight for Earth.
Joshua Bell offers Hispanic headiness at the Proms
At the start of the 20th century, French composers seemed to be conducting a cultural love affair with Spain, an affair initiated by the Universal Exposition of 1889 where the twenty-five-year old Debussy and the fourteen-year-old Ravel had the opportunity to hear new sounds from East Asia, such as the Javanese gamelan, alongside gypsy flamenco from Granada.