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…
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…
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…
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,…
Preview: Opera in the City Festival
The Arts are steadily moving east in London. Nicholas Hytner is launching his new 900-seat theatre at Tower Bridge this autumn: it’s been 80 years since London theatre received such…