We gather in a RADA basement to find two double rows of chairs facing one another across a long, thin central space; the layout faintly recalls a train carriage, the environment in which Belongings was first designed to be performed. The premiere of this opera was, in fact, on the Caledonian Sleeper (one of my…
Not many operas credit their Neural Network Programming: but ‘i’ – The Opera, though recognisably and confidently an opera, thanks Janelle Shane and Dr Amita Kapoor of the University of California, San Diego, for that contribution. The opera tells of the creation of an android girl, a birthday present for a spoilt Princess in a…
The Winter’s Tale is surely one of Shakespeare’s cruellest tragedies: Leontes’ mistaken, yet unshakeable jealousy destroys family bonds and friendships alike, culminating in blasphemy as he refuses to accept the Oracle of Apollo which exonerates his blameless wife. Even the eventual restoration of his wife and daughter, an earthly miracle achieved only by the courage…
Aylin Bozok’s productions of French opera for Grimeborn have all been marked by their elegance, restraint and psychological intensity. Bozok exchanges the orchestra for a piano accompaniment (played here with plangent, unmistakeable panache by Kelvin Lim), keeps the singing in French but projects a clear English translation above the stage, and places our focus squarely…
“I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas.” So, in 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson explained…
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 score, a composer collates (some might smirkingly say today ‘curates’) a selection of other people’s music, organising the chosen arias or passages to illustrate a…
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, have created Così from nothing at all in nine locations across the borough of Merton, using the existing urban landscape as their theatre, stage and…
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 hands of her jealous husband, who comes home early in the piece to find them together. Alexander Zemlinsky’s challenging score makes this intense short opera…
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 quite concealing the tiny vial of fatal poison on a slim chain around his neck; we find ourselves balanced, precariously but effectively, between the 18th…
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,’ I thought to myself, ‘there’ll be more? Won’t they credit them?’ Porgy and Bess, after all, is a large cast opera: a big story, with big…