In this contribution to Kings Place’s 2018 Time Unwrapped series, ‘co-curators’ composer Nico Muhly and countertenor Iestyn Davies explored the relationship between time past and time present, and between stillness and motion.
Category: Performances
Cinderella goes to the panto: WNO in Southampton
Once upon a time, Rossini’s La Cenerentola was the Cinderella among his operatic oeuvre.
It’s a Wonderful Life in San Francisco
It was 1946 when George Bailey of Bedford Falls, NY nearly sold himself to the devil for $20,000. It is 2018 in San Francisco where an annual income of ten times that amount raises you slightly above poverty level, and you’ve paid $310 for your orchestra seat to Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
Des Moines: Glory, Glory Hallelujah
A minor miracle occurred as Des Moines Metro Opera converted a large hall on a Reserve Army Base to a wholly successful theatrical venue, and delivered a stunning rendition of Tom Cipullo’s compelling military-themed one act opera, Glory Denied.
In her beginning is her end: Welsh National Opera’s La traviata in Southampton
David McVicar’s La traviata for Welsh National Opera – first seen at Scottish Opera in 2008 and adopted by WNO in 2009 – wears its heavy-black mourning garb stylishly.
‘So sweet is the pain’: Roberta Invernizzi at Wigmore Hall
In this BBC Radio 3 lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall, soprano Roberta Invernizzi presented Italian songs from the first half of seventeenth-century, exploring love and loyalty, loss and lies, and demonstrating consummate declamatory mastery.
Staging Britten’s War Requiem
“The best music to listen to in a great Gothic church is the polyphony which was written for it, and was calculated for its resonance: this was my approach in the War Requiem – I calculated it for a big, reverberant acoustic and that is where it sounds best.”
Moshinsky’s Simon Boccanegra returns to Covent Garden
Despite the flaming torches of the plebeian plotters which, in the Prologue, etched chiaroscuro omens within the Palladian porticos of Michael Yeargan’s imposing and impressive set, this was a rather slow-burn revival of Elijah Moshinsky’s 1991 production of Simon Boccanegra.
Royal Academy’s Semele offers ‘endless pleasures’
Self-adoring ‘celebrities’ beware. That smart-phone which feeds your narcissism might just prove your nemesis.
The Eternal Flame: Debussy, Lindberg, Stravinsky and Jan·?ek – London Philharmonic, Vladimir Jurowski
Although this concert was ostensibly, and in some respects a little tenuously, linked to the centenary of the Armistice, it did create some challenging assumptions about the nature of war. It was certainly the case in Magnus Lindberg’s new work, Triumf att finnas till… (‘Triumph to Exist…’) that he felt able to dislocate from the horror of the trenches and slaughter by using a text by the wartime poet Edith Sˆdergran which gravitates towards a more sympathetic, even revisionist, expectation of this period.