by Lucien Jenkins | Feb 10, 2020 | Music
Welsh National Opera’s new (to the UK – it first saw the light of day last spring in Bonn) show is a visual triumph. The costumes (Marie-Jeanne Lecca) and set (Raimund Bauer) are arresting. The latter is a series of frames, so the characters seem to be stepping in and...
by Lucien Jenkins | Sep 22, 2019 | Music, Uncategorized
Bizet’s Carmen is a good example of the dark/fair contrast introduced to Romanticism by Walter Scott: here, Carmen’s (Virginie Verrez) smoking, drinking and all-round bad-girl mezzo v. Micaela’s (Anita Watson) clean-living soprano. The task for the fair-haired woman...
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...
