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,...
by Lucien Jenkins | Feb 18, 2019 | Music, Uncategorized
Dancing with Mr D Director David Pountney plays Verdi’s tale of love, death and vendetta with creepily comic touches. Every now and then the chorus get together for a conga line or work coordinated dance steps and hops into their perambulations. This compromises our...
by Lucien Jenkins | Feb 9, 2019 | Music
Emergency exits Leos Janacek’s Kat’a Kabanova, premiered in Brno in 1921, is a brooding piece about adultery and death framed in a plot of older people tyrannising younger ones. Kat’a (normally rendered as Katya), sung by Amanda Majeski, and her husband Tikhon (Andrew...
by Lucien Jenkins | Oct 5, 2018 | Music
The cast in ENO’s new production of Strauss’s biblical opera are on good form. Stuart Jackson’s Narraboth rings out in the opening scene. The eponymous Alison Cook’s voice is not used to ring out but to extremely dramatic effect as the girl caught up in a world in...
by Lucien Jenkins | Oct 1, 2018 | Music, Uncategorized
Facing Tolstoy’s massive novel combining epic and romance, Prokofiev had to choose how far he was composing a war horse and how far a pony. Sadly, a Stalinist committee designed a camel for him. The novel’s Pyotr-called-Pierre (Mark Le Brocq), Natalya-called-Natasha...
