by Lucien Jenkins | Sep 29, 2021 | Music
Photo by Richard Hubert Smith Puccini could almost have written Madama Butterfly after hearing an appeal at a conference on intersectionality for material to support a new module, with its tragic tale of a woman misused by a man, a confrontation between a more- and a... 
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 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... 