Present for the future: A Hansel at Snape Maltings
“One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!” George Eliot (in Middlemarch) points us to the social circularity behind a gift: and this Hansel given at Snape was…
Fresh peaches of temptation: Britten’s Albert Herring at Buxton
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…
Boy Donne good: Toby Spence in Tippett and Britten III, Aldeburgh Festival
Although his words could have been crisper, all the songs came across with a pleasing sense of flow, Spence’s light lyric tenor happily expanding to the rafters at Snape, when…
Survivor’s guilt: Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Guildhall School
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…
A very wicked village: Britten’s Albert Herring
“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…
Midsummer Night Fever: Trinity Laban’s 1970s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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…
The darkness drops again: a tense, eerie Turn of the Screw for the Glyndebourne Tour
Jonathan Kent’s production, revived by Francesca Gilpin for the 2014 Glyndebourne Tour (dedicated to the late Sir George Christie), is as cunning as it is beautiful, thanks to Paul Brown’s…
Britten’s blank postcard from Belsen: The Rape of Lucretia
At the close of the Second World War, Britten visited Bergen-Belsen while on tour in Germany with Yehudi Menuhin, giving concerts for concentration camp survivors. Britten was so shocked by…