In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the aesthetic and songs of courtly love travelled to Germany from Provence and northern France. Minnesinger, like their Romance counterparts, composed both the texts…
Author: Claire Seymour
Anime Immortali: Franco Fagioli offers a portrait of Mozart and the castrato voice
Mozart probably isn’t the first composer whom one thinks of in association with eighteenth-century castrati. But, for over two decades – from Mitridate, re di Ponto K87/74a, written for the…
Opera Rara launch Donizetti Song Project at Wigmore Hall with Lawrence Brownlee & Carlo Rizzi
On Saturday 9 September, Opera Rara launch its Donizetti Song Project at Wigmore Hall with tenor Lawrence Brownlee and its Artistic Director Carlo Rizzi. Continuing its year-long celebration of Donizetti’s…
An uplifting celebration of hybridity: Purcell’s The Fairy Queen at Longborough
‘A rubbishy old play.’ Michael Burden, editor of the Eulenberg edition of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (the first to include the complete spoken text and music), explains that Restoration and…
Semele at Glyndebourne
“No Oratorio, but a baudy [sic] opera.” Such was the assessment of Handel’s Semele offered by Charles Jennens, the librettist of Handel’s Messiah. He was probably echoing the somewhat cold…
Wine, women and song: a tremendous celebration of spring, joy and love at the Proms, from the CBSO and Kazuki Yamada
Wine, women and song. Immortalized by Johann Strauss II in his 1869 Op.333 waltz, Wein, Weib und Gesang, this was also the title that John Addington Symonds gave to his…
The Pilgrim’s Progress at the Three Choirs Festival
‘As regards the Cathedral – it is, to my mind essentially a stage piece & I said I wd not allow it in a hall or church till it was…
The Faerie Bride: sensuousness and mysticism at the Three Choirs Festival
This programme by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, on the second evening of this year’s Three Choirs Festival presented three works that were prevailingly sombre…
The bohemians go to the movies at Opera Holland Park
Giacomo Puccini’s operatic career, from the early 1890s to his death in 1924, roughly coincided with the emergence and early development of cinema and sound recording. However, unlike many of…
Kenneth Leighton: Every Living Creature – a revelatory and truly rewarding disc by Londinium
At the opening of Kenneth Leighton’s Symphony No.3 ‘Laudes musicae’ (1984), the tenor soloist sings the composer’s own hymn of praise: “O yes, I must sing! And so must you…