Glyndebourne
Rinaldo, Glyndebourne Festival OperaSunday, 03 July 2011
Each Handel opera (or the good ones at any rate) has its own musical colour and character. The woody husk of viola d’amore and low oboes bring pastoral calm to the frenzies of Orlando, bassoons lurk with doubt under the glossy strings of Ariodante.... Read more... |
L'elisir d'amore, Glyndebourne Festival OperaThursday, 09 June 2011
Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore must be the only opera from whose central lesson one can actually learn something. Its message - drink, chill out, back off and the girl will be yours - is as good a moral guide to life as any. But it was still... Read more... |
Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival OperaMonday, 23 May 2011
Two 1950s Mozarts in one weekend might seem like pressing the contemporaneity of great art unnecessarily far. But Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, revived on Sunday, is a much less crude update than the WNO Così. True, the dramatis... Read more... |
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Glyndebourne Festival OperaSunday, 22 May 2011
So the world didn't end yesterday as predicted, and Wagner's divine comedy about the meaning of art has weathered the ironic apocalypse following Hitler’s misappropriation. Bayreuth reels, but we Brits are lucky to have two stagings in under a year... Read more... |
theartsdesk in Clonter: The Opera FarmSaturday, 07 May 2011
Deep in rural Cheshire farmland, music is in the air. It’s not the music of the spheres from the Jodrell Bank radio telescope nearby, nor even the sound of the birds and the bleating of the lambs nearby. It is the music of human voices at work on... Read more... |
Hänsel und Gretel, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, Ticciati, Royal Albert HallWednesday, 01 September 2010
Everyone concerned has, of course, total confidence and bags of experience at the end of a riotous run, warmly applauded by Edward Seckerson at Glyndebourne. Yet there were dangers to be negotiated. Only Irmgard Vilsmaier's Sieglinde-cum-Fricka of a... Read more... |
Classical CDs Round-Up 11Saturday, 21 August 2010
This month’s new releases include a skilled orchestral re-imagining of Debussy piano music, some unfairly neglected late romanticism and a box of late Haydn symphonies. There’s a sublime Brahms chamber work, and three contrasting interpretations of... Read more... |
Stravinsky, The Rake's Progress, GlyndebourneMonday, 09 August 2010
Thirty-five years on and this is still as much David Hockney’s Rake as it is Stravinsky’s or W H Auden’s. How rarely it is that what we see chimes so completely and utterly with what we hear. The limited palette of colours, the precisely etched... Read more... |
Hänsel und Gretel, GlyndebourneMonday, 26 July 2010
Glyndebourne’s Hänsel und Gretel comes in a large cardboard box, with plain brown wrapper, duct-tape and a barcode. There’s a public health warning, too: sugar and spice and all things nice come at a price. The evil witch Rosina Sweet-Tooth is... Read more... |
Infinite variety at CharlestonMonday, 12 July 2010
Oh, those Bloomsberries: what fun they must have had at Charleston farmhouse snug under the Sussex downs - Vanessa and Clive Bell in menage with Duncan Grant, Lytton and Virginia popping in for tea... Well, maybe not, if you're allergic to the... Read more... |
Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival OperaSunday, 04 July 2010
It seems somehow wrong to come away from a Don Giovanni feeling a bit noncommittal about the whole thing. It’s the sort of opera that should raise you from your seat – that should fire and inspire – but this performance, directed by Jonathan Kent,... Read more... |
Macbeth, GlyndebourneFriday, 18 June 2010
Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of fleetingly funny moments. Halfway through the regicidal Second Act, we stumble upon a castle porter gibbering on about the bodily consequences of drink - "nose-painting, sleep and urine". Verdi's opera mostly shuns... Read more... |
