The first two instalments of the Academy of Ancient Music’s ‘Purcell trilogy’ at the Barbican Hall have posed plentiful questions – creative, cultural and political.
Category: Commentary
Bampton Classical Opera Goes to the Ball
I wonder if Cinderella realised that when she found her Prince she would also find international fame, becoming not just a Princess but also a global celebrity and icon. The glass slipper, placed loving on her shapely foot, has graced theatres, variety halls, cinema screens and opera houses – even postage stamps – and the perennial popularity of this rags-to-riches fairy-tale, in which innocence and goodness triumph over injustice and oppression, shows no signs of waning.
Glyndebourne announces new Artistic Director
Stephen Langridge has been appointed Artistic Director of Glyndebourne. Stephen is currently Director for Opera and Drama at Gothenburg Opera, Sweden, a role he has occupied for five years. He will take up his new role at Glyndebourne in spring 2019.
Angelika Kirchschlager’s first Winterreise
In the opera house and on the concert platform, we are accustomed to ‘women being men’, as it were. From heroic knights to adolescent youths, women don the armour and trousers, and no-one bats an eyelid.
Beyond Gilbert and Sullivan: Edward Loder’s Raymond and Agnes and the Apotheosis of English Romantic Opera
Mention ‘nineteenth-century English opera’ to most people, and
they will immediately think ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’. If they
really know their Gilbert and Sullivan, they’ll probably remember
that Sullivan always wanted to compose more serious operas, but that
Gilbert resisted this, believing they should ‘stick to their
last’: light, comic, tuneful satire.
Mascagni’s Isabeau at Opera Holland Park: in conversation with David Butt Philip
Opera directors are used to thinking their way out of theatrical, dramaturgical and musico-dramatic conundrums, but one of the more unusual challenges must be how to stage the spectacle of a young princess’s naked horseback-ride through the streets of a city.
The Moderate Soprano : Q&A with Nancy Carroll and Roger Allam
Nancy Carroll and Roger Allam play Audrey Mildmay and John Christie in David Hare’s play The Moderate Soprano which is currently at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London.
No Time in Eternity: Iestyn Davies discusses Purcell and Nyman
Revolution, repetition, rhetoric. On my way to meet countertenor Iestyn Davies, I ponder if these are the elements that might form connecting threads between the music of Henry Purcell and Michael Nyman, whose works will be brought together later this month when Davies joins the viol consort Fretwork for a thought-provoking recital at Milton Court Concert Hall.
Garsington’s Douglas Boyd on Strauss and Skating Rinks
‘On August 3, 1941, the day that Capriccio was finished, 682 Jews were killed in Chernovtsy, Romania; 1,500 in Jelgava, Latvia; and several hundred in Stanis?awÛw, Ukraine. On October 28, 1942, the day of the opera’s premiere in Munich, the first convoy of Jews from Theresienstadt arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and 90 percent of them went to the gas chamber.’
Two of Garsington Opera’s 2018 productions to reach a wider audience
Garsington Opera is delighted to announce that on Saturday 6 October, BBC Radio 3’s ‘Opera on 3’, will broadcast the production of its first festival world premiere – The Skating Rink by David Sawer set to a libretto by Rory Mullarkey based on a novel by Chilean author Roberto BolaÒo.