Bungay boasts several natural blessings when it comes to the arts. The town itself is of storybook prettiness; its Georgian theatre, sensitively restored in recent years, still has some original features excitingly intact from 1828: and Bungay’s ruined castle, meanwhile, dates back to 1173. Once the stronghold of Hugh Bigod, that rebellious Earl eventually had…
It all started with a tweet: in October 2011, Genevieve Raghu realised she had just missed Patrick Hawes’ concert in Norwich the previous week, and tweeted the composer to ask how it had gone. Their subsequent conversation led to a meeting, which led to a sharing of ideas, and six years later Raghu and Hawes…
In Norfolk, we tend to be quietly, fondly proud of our surroundings – with an emphasis on ‘quietly.’ The tradition of Norfolk understatement is legendary, rivalled only by our keen attachment to the smooth horizons and vast skies which dominate our severe rural landscape. Accordingly, it shouldn’t have surprised me (as a local) that I…
Although opera is traditionally associated with grand narrative structures, sometimes its heightened psychological intensity can be remarkably effective at drawing us into an intimate historical moment, and just keeping us there a little while. Schutzwall tells the story of two sisters – Angelika Meyer (Mimi Doulton) and Suzanne Meyer (Ella Taylor) – suddenly separated by…
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…
“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…
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 piano. Bemoaning its loneliness and fear, this creature, the World Spirit, sings of its struggles with the Devil and its memories of all life on…
Director Timothy Nelson has created a new performing edition of Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen for Iford, which picks out the most familiar scenes and divides them into four “Nights” (the Mechanicals’ rehearsal, Oberon and Titania’s quarrel, the human lovers’ confusion, and the Mechanicals’ play), framed by a Prologue and Epilogue. Purcell’s music is not only exquisite, but here is…
Some people get terribly, passionately serious about Wagner. This shouldn’t be a problem: truly great music of all kinds tends to attract obsessive adulation, especially whenever the artist is a controversial, genre-breaking genius (cf. the recent press reaction to the death of David Bowie). But the sad fact is that too often, this fervent Wagner-worship…