Cardiff
Say It With Flowers, Sherman Theatre, CardiffSunday, 19 May 2013
There is a glaring irony in that a play about an all-consuming obsession with one thing (fame) has no real idea of what it itself is supposed to be. Say It With Flowers, a purported biography of iconic lounge singer Dorothy Squires, teases at the... Read more... |
The Cunning Little Vixen, Welsh National OperaMonday, 25 February 2013
Janáček’s opera subjects – the 300-year-old opera singer, the composer with a mad mother-in-law, the Siberian prison camp – are by any standards a fairly rum collection. But The Cunning Little Vixen is arguably the most deviant of the whole bunch.... Read more... |
Madam Butterfly, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 16 February 2013
Last week Lulu, this week Cio-Cio San, next week the Vixen Bystrouška. These are the three exemplars of David Pountney’s “Free Spirits” – as he labels his first themed season with WNO. But it’s hard to see poor little Butterfly, pinned to a board by... Read more... |
Orpheus in the Underworld, Opera'r DdraigWednesday, 13 February 2013
Since I last reviewed Opera’r Ddraig (no longer offered as Dragon Opera in their publicity) two years ago, this company of students and postgraduates has moved house, and this year is staging its main show, Offenbach’s delightfully absurd Orpheus... Read more... |
Lulu, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 09 February 2013
What-ifs and might-have-beens are usually as pointless in music as in any other walk of life. Still one can’t help wondering how Alban Berg would have completed – and, no less interesting, revised – his opera Lulu, if he hadn’t been stung by some... Read more... |
BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Atherton, St David's Hall, CardiffSaturday, 26 January 2013
The Britten centenary will, among much else, inspire performances of his comparatively under-regarded instrumental works - pieces like the cello suites and the string quartets, already sampled in brilliant performances at last week’s Wye Valley... Read more... |
WNO Chorus and Orchestra, Poppen, St David's Hall, CardiffSaturday, 17 November 2012
Speaking about the Requiem he composed in 1990 in memory of the London Sinfonietta’s long-time artistic director Michael Vyner, Hans Werner Henze always talked as a believing atheist. “Paradise is here or ought to be,” he insisted, “not later, when... Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Welsh National OperaThursday, 04 October 2012
For some reason, the Welsh have revived their Così fan tutte, from last year, with positively unseemly haste – if not quite so unseemly as the haste with which their La Bohème, from this spring, was wheeled back on last month barely three months... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Cape Town: Mandela TrilogyMonday, 18 June 2012
“Come to the front with those guns. You need to frighten those poor Brits – pah, pah, pah, pah, pah!” Michael Williams hurls his fist forward as if wielding his own weapon as he urges the demonstrators with their sticks and guns forward. The crowd... Read more... |
La Bohème, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 02 June 2012
Of all Romantic operas, La Bohème is perhaps the one that responds best to what one might, for want of a better phrase, call straight theatrical treatment. It’s pure genre: no hidden meanings, no contemporary significance. “Scenes from the life”, as... Read more... |
Tristan und Isolde, Welsh National OperaSunday, 20 May 2012
Welsh National Opera has a good track record with Wagner. Its Meistersinger of two summers ago is already the stuff of legend (and alas not likely to return to reality); farther back one recalls a more than respectable Parsifal, a notable Ring cycle... Read more... |
On reinventing ClytemnestraSunday, 15 April 2012
Like many students, I read the Oresteia by Aeschylus as an undergraduate as part of a compulsory Tragedy paper. A while ago I was asked would I do a new version of the Oresteia. I’m not a Greek scholar so I feel I have no authority to offer a "... Read more... |
