Jo Davies’ new production of Carmen for Welsh National Opera presents not the exotic Orientalism of nineteenth-century France, nor a tale of the racial ‘Other’, feared and fantasised in equal measure by those whose native land she has infiltrated.
Author: Claire Seymour
Die Zauberflˆte brings mixed delights at the Royal Opera House
When did anyone leave a performance of Mozart’s Singspiel without some serious head scratching?
Haydn’s La fedelt‡ premiata impresses at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama
‘Exit, pursued by an octopus.’ The London Underground insignia in the centre of the curtain-drop at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama’s Silk Street Theatre, advised patrons arriving for the performance of Joseph Haydn’s La fedelt‡ premiata (Fidelity Rewarded, 1780) that their Tube journey had terminated in ‘Arcadia’ – though this was not the pastoral idyll of Polixenes’ Bohemia but a parody of paradise more notable for its amatory anarchy than any utopian harmony.
Purcell for our time: Gabrieli Consort & Players at St John’s Smith Square
Passing the competing Union and EU flags on College Green beside the Palace of Westminster on my way to St John’s Smith Square, where Paul McCreesh’s Gabrieli Consort & Players were to perform Henry Purcell’s 1691 ‘dramatic opera’ King Arthur, the parallels between England now and England then were all too evident.
Philip Glass: Music with Changing Parts – European premiere of revised version
Philip Glass has described Music with Changing Parts as a transitional work, its composition falling between earlier pieces like Music in Fifths and Music in Contrary Motion (both written in 1969), Music in Twelve Parts (1971-4) and the opera Einstein on the Beach (1975). Transition might really mean aberrant or from no-man’s land, because performances of it have become rare since the very early 1980s (though it was heard in London in 2005).
Wexford Festival Opera 2019
The 68th Wexford Festival Opera, which runs until Sunday 3rd November, is bringing past, present and future together in ways which suggest that the Festival is in good health, and will both blossom creatively and stay true to its roots in the years ahead.
Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus: English National Opera
‘All opera is Orpheus,’ Adorno once declared – although, typically, what he meant by that was rather more complicated than mere quotation would suggest. Perhaps, in some sense, all music in the Western tradition is too – again, so long as we take care, as Harrison Birtwistle always has, never to confuse starkness with over-simplification.
Puccini’s Le Willis: a fine new recording from Opera Rara
The 23-year-old Giacomo Puccini was still three months from the end of his studies at the Conservatoire in Milan when, in April 1883, he spotted an announcement of a competition for a one-act opera in Il teatro illustrato, a journal was published by Edoardo Sonzogno, the Italian publisher of Bizet’s Carmen.
Little magic in Zauberland at the ROH’s Linbury Theatre
To try to conceive of Schumann’s Dichterliebe as a unified formal entity is to deny the song cycle its essential meaning. For, its formal ambiguities, its disintegrations, its sudden breaks in both textual image and musical sound are the very embodiment of the early Romantic aesthetic of fragmentation.
Soprano Eleanor Dennis performs Beethoven and Schubert at the 2019 Highgate International Chamber Music Festival
When soprano Eleanor Dennis was asked – by Ashok Klouda, one of the founders and co-directors of the Highgate International Chamber Music Festival – to perform some of Beethoven’s Scottish Songs Op.108 at this year’s Festival, as she leafed through the score to make her selection the first thing that struck her was the beauty of the poetry.