by Lucien Jenkins | Jul 8, 2019 | Music
All aboard Benjamin Britten’s 1958 account of the flood described in Genesis draws on the mediaeval mystery plays, in which obedience is a key theme. While other human beings are busy being wicked, Noah is obedient to God’s command and starts building the ship without...
by Lucien Jenkins | Jun 23, 2019 | Music
Let my people go Hans Krása’s Brundibár is perhaps the only opera given its early performances by a cast on death row. Written for a competition, it was first performed in 1942 in the Jewish orphanage in occupied Prague. The second performance was put on in the...
by Lucien Jenkins | Jun 14, 2019 | Music
No waiting Second up in WNO’s imaginative ‘Rhyddid/Freedom’ season is Gian Carlo Menotti’s political opera from 1949. Well known to American TV audiences as the composer of the children’s Christmas TV opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, Menotti is hardly a...
by Lucien Jenkins | Jun 9, 2019 | Music
In recent years opera has started to pick its topics out of the newspapers, finding material in the everyday in a way Puccini would have approved. Now WNO has turned to Jake Heggie’s fact-based tale, premiered in 2000, of a nun going to meet a death-row prisoner...
by Lucien Jenkins | Mar 9, 2019 | Music
Killer queen The low point in Donizetti’s “Elizabeth and Essex” opera comes when the pit strikes up a version of the National Anthem. The howling anachronism isn’t the problem: the history of opera contains many such, and we tend to cope. The trouble is,...
