The concept of the monologue in opera has existed since the birth of opera itself, but when we come to monodramas – with the exception of Rousseau’s Pygmalion (1762) – we are looking at something that originated at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Category: Reviews
ENO’s Salome both intrigues and bewilders
Femme fatale, femme nouvelle, she-devil: the personification of patriarchal castration-anxiety and misogynistic terror of female desire.
In the Company of Heaven: The Cardinall’s Musick at Wigmore Hall
Palestrina led from the front, literally and figuratively, in this performance at Wigmore Hall which placed devotion to the saints at its heart, with Saints Peter, Paul, Catherine of Alexandria, Bartholomew and the Virgin Mary all musically honoured by The Cardinall’s Musick and their director Andrew Carwood.
Roberto Devereux in San Francisco
Opera’s triple crown, Donizetti’s tragic queens — Anna Bolena who was beheaded by her husband Henry VIII, their daughter Elizabeth I who beheaded her rival Mary, Queen of Scots and who executed her lover Roberto Devereux.
O18: Queens Tries Royally Hard
Opera Philadelphia is lightening up the fare at its annual festival with a three evening cabaret series in the Theatre of Living Arts, Queens of the Night.
O18 Magical Mystery Tour: Glass Handel
How to begin to quantify the wonderment stirred in my soul by Opera Philadelphia’s sensational achievement that is Glass Handel?
Magic Lantern Tales: darkness, disorientation and delight from Cheryl Frances-Hoad
“It produces Effects not only very delightful, but to such as know the contrivance, very wonderful; so that Spectators, not well versed in Opticks, that could see the various Apparitions and Disappearances, the Motions, Changes and Actions, that may this way be presented, would readily believe them super-natural and miraculous.”
A lunchtime feast of English song: Lucy Crowe and Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall
The September sunshine that warmed Wigmore Street during Monday’s lunch-hour created the perfect ambience for this thoughtfully compiled programme of seventeenth- and twentieth-century English song presented by soprano Lucy Crowe and pianist Joseph Middleton at Wigmore Hall.
O18: Mad About Lucia
Opera Philadelphia has mounted as gripping and musically ravishing an account of Lucia di Lammermoor as is imaginable.
O18 Poulenc Evening: Moins C’est Plus
In Opera Philadelphia’s re-imagined La voix humaine, diva Patricia Racette had a tough “act” to follow …