Tamerlane (1336-1405): Mongol conqueror, masterful military leader and tactician, murderous tyrant. The son of a nomadic shepherd Taraqai – a minor nobleman from the Barlas tribe – Tamerlane (also known…
Category: Interviews
Mirages: Roderick Williams and Roger Vignoles explore the ‘art’ of French song
The repertory of French mélodie must comprise many thousands of songs. The genre, which developed in the early 1800s and reached full maturity in the second half of the century, was…
Juliana: a ‘naturalistic tragedy’ for our times
In the Preface to his 1888 play, Miss Julie, August Strindberg argued for a new, less artificial form of dialogue – associative, flowing naturally, as in life: ‘I have avoided…
Music opens the doors of memory: new opera company, Theatre of Sound, launches with a radical retelling of Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle
Forbidden chambers, corpses dangling from wall-hooks, pools of clotted blood, stigmata of guilt: ‘Bluebeard’, which first appeared in literary form in Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century collection, Tales of Mother Goose, is…
Ephemera & Inventions: composer Tom Coult discusses two Oxford Lieder Festival premieres
‘Suppose you were to be roused from your sleep with the cry of “Fire!” and were informed that the house in which you had been sleeping was in flames, how…
A trio of operas by Gustav Holst at the 2021 Leeds Opera Festival
Gustav Holst completed nine operas. They span his compositional career. None were commissioned; several were not performed in his lifetime; most did not meet with critical acclaim. Few would consider…
Great Women: the words and lives of four powerful 20th-century Irish women are brought to life by composer Gráinne Mulvey and soprano Elizabeth Hilliard
Born Constance Gore-Booth in County Sligo in February 1868, Countess Constance Markievicz was a co-commander in the 1916 Easter Rising and the first Irish woman elected to Parliament. Alongside Markievicz…
The Children’s Hour: an eclectic and enlightening new disc from baritone Gareth Brynmor John
Between the dark and the daylight, When the night is beginning to lower,Comes a pause in the day’s occupations, That is known as the Children’s Hour. The nineteenth-century poet Henry…
Alastair White’s ROBE: a ‘fashion-opera’
If Rousseau, Marx, Einstein, Lacan and Bill Gates were to collaborate on an opera, what would they create? Perhaps something not unlike ROBE by the Scottish composer and writer Alastair…
A premiere recording of Handel’s pasticcio, Caio Fabbricio, by London Early Opera
1733 was not a good year for George Frideric Handel. His business affairs were in a shaky state, the collapse of the Royal Academy in 1728 having forced him, in…