Songs for a mad emperor: Sarah Toth’s Nero Monologues
Sarah Toth’s Nero Monologues is a pastiche opera, or pasticcio: this is a recognised form of opera making, used by Handel among others, where rather than writing an entirely fresh…
Rapturous, languorous beauty: Lully’s Armide, Grimeborn
If you fancy being entertained like a French king, head to Grimeborn for Lully’s Armide. Lully’s artistic monopoly over French opera lasted well beyond his death (thanks to some dastardly patenting, as…
Glowing with ideas: Simone Spagnolo’s Even you, lights, cannot hear me
On a dark, empty landscape, strewn with white rocks, a two headed creature (baritone James Schouten and mezzo Kate Symonds-Joy, back to back on a rotating rock) sits at a…
Unexpected Mozart in the bagging area: Così fan tutte, Merton Street Opera
Baseless Fabric Theatre have taken Mozart’s Così fan tutte to the streets this summer, in the most literal sense. Their exceptional cast of five fantastic singers, and three brave instrumentalists,…
Lust, silk and strangulation: Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy
Oscar Wilde never finished his play A Florentine Tragedy, an unsettling little story of the attempted seduction of a merchant’s wife by the local prince, and that prince’s death at the…
Duel of duos: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, Mascagni’s Zanetto
Mozart wears jeans under his brocade jacket and white wig, and is sometimes found playing with his mobile; Salieri’s ruffled shirt is under a dark modern suit, its folds not…
Nuttin’ much: tattered shreds of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at Grimeborn
My suspicions should have been aroused by the fact that there was no programme for Porgy and Bess. The website had listed just two singers: Talia Cohen and Masimba Ushe. ‘Surely,’…
DIARY OF ONE WHO DISAPPEARED, Janáček, Grimeborn
The poems which inspired the mysterious song cycle Diary of One Who Disappeared first appeared anonymously published in a newspaper in May 1916. They immediately caught the eye of composer Leos Janáček,…
Dark, desperate, magnificent: Handel’s Jephtha, Iford
As Handel wrote Jephtha‘s haunting central chorus, “How dark, O Lord, are thy decrees,” his own sight temporarily failed him, and he had to break off work. Although he would live…
Yet another Icarus: Lanza
The world shows us so many Icaruses: gifted people who fly too high too fast, and are soon burned by the extent of their own success, spiralling irrevocably into addiction,…