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,...
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...
