by Lucien Jenkins | Mar 6, 2022 | Music
WNO’s latest staging of Katie Mitchell’s staging of Jenůfa (revived by director Eloise Lally) is given an additional layer of significance by current events. Janáček’s is an opera in a Slav language, in a production with various Slav participants, chronicling... 
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 Lucien Jenkins | Jun 9, 2019 | Music
In recent years opera has started to pick its topics out of the newspapers, finding material in the everyday in a way Puccini would have approved. Now WNO has turned to Jake Heggie’s fact-based tale, premiered in 2000, of a nun going to meet a death-row prisoner... 
by Lucien Jenkins | Mar 9, 2019 | Music
Killer queen The low point in Donizetti’s “Elizabeth and Essex” opera comes when the pit strikes up a version of the National Anthem. The howling anachronism isn’t the problem: the history of opera contains many such, and we tend to cope. The trouble is,... 