by Tom Sutcliffe | Feb 16, 2020 | Music
ENO no-no It is easy to see why Verdi was attracted to Schiller’s tragedy about the class system, Kabale und Liebe. A genius from the lower orders, Verdi believed in freedom and was classless. English-speaking critics patronise the Schiller play because of the poison...
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 Alexandra Coghlan | Feb 7, 2020 | Music
Gerald Barry’s Alice opera is less an adaptation than an invasion. The Irish composer takes Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Alice Through the Looking Glass and unleashes the full force of his madcap, surrealist imagination at them....
by Tom Sutcliffe | Jan 21, 2020 | Music
Love thy neighbour Kurt Weill’s 1947 “Broadway opera” contains much fine writing, musically and dramatically. It is not shaped like a verismo opera: its excellent songs do not play the same intently focused role as in Puccini. Yet it shows off Weill’s huge theatrical...
by Tom Sutcliffe | Nov 28, 2019 | Music
Royal crush by Tom Sutcliffe Death in Venice, Benjamin Britten’s last opera, was always a special case – special because written for the composer’s beloved (and habitually unfaithful) partner Peter Pears, but also special because of the composer’s complicated interest...
by Music Editor | Nov 10, 2019 | Music
Brexcalibur by Robert Thicknesse Who will write the King Arthur for another fractured age? Purcell’s sweet pageant is unlikely to serve as a rallying point, I fear. But that’s surely what it was in 1691, as England and Britain began a long climb out of a half-century...
