by Sebastian Scotney | Jul 20, 2019 | Music
Kitchen sunk drama There might come a time when this new Glyndebourne production of Mozart’s Magic Flute by the Franco-Canadian team of stage director/choreographer Renaud Doucet, and costume/set designer André Barbe, trading as Barbe and Doucet, will find its...
by Sebastian Scotney | Jun 15, 2019 | Music
Midsummer murders Grinding poverty and death at knife-point. A dinner interval. More poverty, drug dependency, a hurricane, another stabbing. Then a drive home through leafy Surrey. An evening spent at Porgy & Bess at Grange Park Opera does throw up some extreme...
by Sebastian Scotney | Jul 16, 2018 | Music, Uncategorized
“Is there no ‘beyond?’/ Are we already there?” Ariadne asks towards the end of Ariadne auf Naxos. At the opening night, conductor Anthony Negus and the Longborough Orchestra were conveying exactly that sense of having suddenly stumbled across new and unexpected joys....
by Sebastian Scotney | Jun 25, 2018 | Music
Juliette bravo “Dramatic art is the art of a portraitist,” Gounod wrote in his Mémoires d’un artiste. “It must translate characters as a painter depicts a face or an attitude.” It is a curious proposition, indeed it might be thought to raise more questions...
by Sebastian Scotney | Feb 7, 2018 | Music
“Will she appear?” I was asked by a friend just a few hours before last night’s concert. Martha Argerich has become so indelibly associated with the adjective “elusive”, it increases the urgency to catch her when she does. And appear she duly did in front...
