‘The Rules’ define a male-centric world as oppressive and restrictive as Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. Kings rule by divine right. Gender is binary. The value of a woman is her purity.…
Tag: Royal Academy of Music
Royal Academy Opera: Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio
This bright, bold and brisk production of Rossini’s La cambiale di matrimonio (The Marriage Contract) at the Royal Academy of Music confirmed one thing: that the 18-year-old Rossini knew what…
A lovely, lucid Figaro at the Royal Academy of Music
La folle journée is the title of the second play in Pierre Beaumarchais’s ‘Figaro trilogy’ and, duly, the single ‘mad day’ on which the wedding of Figaro and Susanna takes…
The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Academy of Music
Blessed by varied approaches to its staging and performance, The Rake’s Progress seems to remain eternally itself (whatever that might mean, as a sometime Prince of Wales might have put…
An irreverent but stylishly sung Imeneo at the Royal Academy of Music
Imeneo, Handel’s penultimate opera, has a somewhat chaotic history. It was the only one of Handel’s forty or so operas to be presented as an ‘operetta’ – perhaps to make…
The Royal Academy of Music celebrates 200 years with a triple bill and a new opera
Commissioning a new opera for its 200th anniversary, and then staging and performing it with such excellence, are laudable things for the Royal Academy of Music to have done. If…
In conversation with the Brazilian baritone, Vitor Bispo
When I attended Royal Academy Opera’s Figaro back in March, Vitor Bispo’s authoritative Count Almaviva caught my ear and eye. Subsequently, it was not surprising to learn that the Brazilian…