Opera
David Nice
Everyone who heard it must have been charmed by South African soprano Pretty Yende’s Radio 4 chat in which she recounted what hooked her on opera. It was a coup de foudre, watching a British Airways ad on telly at home in Piet Retief, and the sound of those two female voices entwined in the Flower Duet from Delibes’ Lakmé.Quite a catchy tunesmith, that Delibes: for those of an older generation, like myself, it was Lakmé's Bell Song which parents remembered from old films, occasioning in my case a trip to Sutton Record Library to find it on The World of Joan Sutherland. I became infatuated Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The question about Harrison Birtwistle’s Down by the Greenwood Side is: what is it? Designated by the composer as a “dramatic pastoral”, which is not very enlightening, it is not really an opera, nor a play with music, nor a piece of performance art, but somehow a winning combination of all three.Commissioned by the Brighton Festival in 1969, the revival of Down by the Greenwood Side is part of the celebrations for the composer’s 80th-birthday year, and Sir Harrison was in the sold-out audience at the Sunday performance. But it is hard to connect the present Birtwistle, elder statesman of the Read more ...
David Nice
Poised when I met him six weeks ago between 40th anniversary celebrations of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, of which he has been a shaping chief conductor for the past five years and putting his new music directorship of Glyndebourne into action, Robin Ticciati hardly seemed like a man in positions of power, more an idealistic youth with a touch of the dreamer softening a powerful intellect.He was much the same, in short, as when I’d first encountered him sharing a 2009 Glyndebourne study day on Janáček's Jenůfa (Ticciati holding the score below) in the then-26 year old’s last Read more ...
Brian Dickie
I started work at Glyndebourne in 1962 at the age of 20 and remained there for 27 years, for the last seven of which I was General Administrator. Throughout that period George was Chairman of Glyndebourne Productions, and my ultimate boss. George was six and a half years older than me, and had already been Chairman for three years in 1962. He was still working full time at the Gulbenkian Foundation and he and Mary, with their first child Hector, were living during the week in their Godfrey Street house in London. They were, however, in Glyndeboune every weekend. So George was a regular Read more ...
David Nice
Mozart usually makes a fine concert bedfellow for his most devoted admirer among later composers, Richard Strauss. With the proviso that the 39th rather than the 38th Symphony would have made a better prologue to excerpts from Der Rosenkavalier last night – Mozart's later work has a minuet which Strauss imitates in the breakfast badinage of his Marschallin and Octavian, while the “Prague” Symphony has none – Sir Mark Elder made the companionship shine last night. The Barbican Hall took on a brightness for the Mozart, while the hall dazzled and spun as it must in any great Rosenkavalier Read more ...
theartsdesk
It's the genre of gender-bending and cross-dressing, where women play warriors and men sing like women (while playing warriors). But when it comes to opera, who really wears the trousers? For at least 300 years the answer has been pretty definitive. Women have donned breeches and boots to play opera's many "trouser roles" in music from Handel and Mozart to Massenet and Offenbach. This month Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught takes on one of the repertoire's very finest trouser roles, making her Glyndebourne debut as the lovestruck young nobleman Octavian in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier Read more ...
David Nice
She is now the world’s leading interpreter of Richard Strauss’s Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, the aristocratic thirtysomething once forced into marriage with a far from ideal husband and determined not to let it happen to the sweet girl who falls for her own much younger lover on first sight. As a happily married woman, Anne Schwanewilms has no need of 17-year-old boys, and in her vocal prime she can have no regrets about ageing beautifully, but she shares both the Marschallin’s wit, with a wicked line in impersonating certain conductors, and her natural charm.Schwanewilms first beguiled Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s been a bloody week on the London stage. First Titus Andronicus maims and mutilates at the Globe, and now at English National Opera Frank McGuinness and Julian Anderson bring us a distillation of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, complete with eye-gouging and assorted hangings. But while Lucy Bailey found eloquent meaning in Shakespeare’s brutality, could Anderson do the same in this, his first opera?This is thoughtful, hard-fought art that resists immediate assimilation. Thebans is the considered response to recent ENO premieres – the baffling Sunken Garden and insubstantial Two Boys – Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Baroque operas are like buses. You wait years for some Cavalli to come along, and then three of his operas arrive almost at once. It all started with English Touring Opera’s Jason last October – a witty and endlessly shape-shifting work – followed by the Royal Opera’s glossy L’Ormindo at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last month. Now, undeterred by larger rivals, Hampstead Garden Opera continue the trend with La Calisto.HGO are a fixture of London’s fringe opera scene, staging considered, well-funded productions with strong young singers in the theatre above Highgate’s Gatehouse pub. Read more ...
theartsdesk
Its constituent parts come in all sizes, tall and small, compact or full-bodied, and span the ages. But put them all together and an operatic chorus is a vast but single organism that sings – and moves – as one. The current Glyndebourne Chorus consists of 15 sopranos, 12 mezzos, 13 tenors and 18 basses. The longest-serving member has been singing with the Chorus for 18 years, but there is an annual intake from music colleges which will include several aspiring soloists.Not everyone will make it all the way to the top, but our gallery of greats supplies ample proof that the Glyndebourne Chorus Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Has anyone ever sat through Musorgsky’s last, not quite finished, opera about the struggle for power in Moscow at the time of Peter the Great’s accession in the 1690s, and come away with the slightest idea of what it’s all about? If Khovanshchina had depended for its impact on any kind of Verdian clarity or dramaturgical shape, it would long ago have sunk without trace.But then there’s the music, page after page of inspired, vivid, unforgettable choral writing and solo portraiture that at times even matches Boris Godunov in sheer immediacy and power. It’s a work that, against the odds, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The German soprano Diana Damrau has had the role of Violetta Valéry in La Traviata in her sights for a very long time. As she has explained in interviews, seeing the Zeffirelli film of the opera, with Teresa Stratas in the title role, as a 12-year old was a decisive moment in making her want to become a singer. That was 30 years ago. Now, as the pre-eminent high soprano in the world, she is performing the role in several leading opera houses. Last night she made her debut as Violetta at Covent Garden.Damrau's musicality and security of vocal line are spellbinding. It is impossible to imagine Read more ...