July brings a flurry of festivals to the exquisite Georgian spa town: not just the opera, literature, jazz and other music of the Buxton International Festival (soon to celebrate its 40th anniversary in 2019), but well dressing, a special Derbyshire tradition which can be directly traced back to the 17th century. Art meets life, then, in…
Although I had undoubtedly come to Snape that evening solely in order to hear Ian Bostridge sing Britten and Tippett, I left feeling the most astonished, and exhilarated, by Britten’s extraordinary String Quartet no. 1, played with blistering skill and forensic intensity by the Arcadia Quartet. Britten’s String Quartet no. 1 had a tremulous, magical opening into which…
Director Struan Leslie’s reimagining of Britten’s Les Illuminations song cycle opened the Aldeburgh Festival with an exciting array of circus performers, creating a dreamy evening without plot, but heady with potent mood, emotions and ideas developing across the darkened stage like scudding clouds across a stormy summer sky, culminating in a wonderful account of the cycle from…
Melly Still’s magical production of Janáček‘s The Cunning Little Vixen (revival, 2012) is back, the only opera I know to have been born from a comic strip. Still’s vision balances a fine naturalistic sense with elements of Eastern European folktale and cartoon to deliver a world of animals bursting with colour, while humans exist in monochrome…
The Rape of Lucretia finds Britten trying to come to terms with World War Two, and his own absence from the action as a conscientious objector, by evoking ideas of youthful beauty and innocence before allowing them to be brutally destroyed on stage by the ugly and unrestrained wielding of greedy power, using the structure…
“Scorn the sweetmeats of temptation!”, warns Lady Billows, as the village of Loxford gathers to crown its May King – a King, because so many village maidens have failed to resist those sinful sweetmeats that a Queen simply cannot be crowned this year. But Albert Herring, who lives with his mother, works in her shop…
Oberon reaches near-Bowie levels of magnificence in a feather-fringed fur coat, PVC trousers and glam rock makeup; Tytania shimmers in a pink evening gown and boa worthy of any cabaret diva. Trinity Laban’s 1970s A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes Britten to the disco – and back again. Cordelia Chisholm’s clean, hard set, made luscious with…