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 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 Rick Jones | Apr 9, 2019 | Music, Uncategorized
The dark, dank streets and tenements of London’s notorious borough of Whitechapel in 1888 are powerfully captured by English National Opera’s production of Jack the Ripper. Composer Iain Bell has created a rich and sumptuous score with a Romantic flavour in the...
by Lucien Jenkins | Feb 18, 2019 | Music, Uncategorized
Dancing with Mr D Director David Pountney plays Verdi’s tale of love, death and vendetta with creepily comic touches. Every now and then the chorus get together for a conga line or work coordinated dance steps and hops into their perambulations. This compromises our...
by Music Editor | Dec 6, 2018 | Music, Uncategorized
Weeping songs By Robert Thicknesse How many gloomy songs can you take at one sitting? The Spitalfields Festival invited its audience to test its mettle in this programme of downbeat (or even deadbeat) numbers by Purcell, Blow, John Dowland, Pelham Humfrey, and one...
