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 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 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 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 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...
