by Tom Sutcliffe | Oct 15, 2019 | Music
On the pull We are not meant to sympathise with Don Pasquale, the elderly rich gent who is the central character of Donizetti’s perfectly moulded comedy premiered in Paris in 1843 and an instant hit. In the Royal Opera rep it has now arrived very well cast (and staged...
by Tom Sutcliffe | Oct 15, 2019 | Music, Uncategorized
To hell with it Daniel Kramer’s brief tenure as artistic director of English National Opera bore fruit of a sort in this season’s perhaps slightly smart-looking opening project of four works related to the Orphic myth. Orpheus who is supposed to have charmed animals...
by Tom Sutcliffe | Oct 15, 2019 | Music, Uncategorized
Add baby, remove bathwater Glyndebourne’s touring company used to serve two purposes; partly it was a way of spreading the quality of Glyndebourne’s own festival productions more widely around the country, but more importantly it helped some talented British...
by Tom Sutcliffe | Jun 12, 2019 | Music
Misfire The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue, a great Japanese 20th-century author, is a complex, subtle tale involving three women, sexual betrayal by one of them with the husband of another, a daughter’s viewpoint, and the adulteress’s suicide. We get diverse...
by Tom Sutcliffe | May 28, 2019 | Music
Byway to hell All Berlioz’s few operas are highly original in structure and intention – a characteristic encouraged by this brilliant composer’s obsession with Shakespeare as a model alien in French culture. But his Damnation de Faust is not an opera, more like...
