On a clean, largely clear stage, dotted with a few barrels and benches, a tidy vegetable stand to one side and a pub sign, The Four Bears, to the other, a stormy sky lours menacingly at us, cradling a high, full moon at its corner. Cambridge University Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s Ruddigore starts as it…
The more concerts you experience, the more grows your confidence in being able to pick a good one. And this promised to be good, given the exceptional skill of the Academy of Ancient Music, and a team of soloists featuring Mary Bevan. However, and perhaps inevitably, I found myself relishing quite unexpected aspects of this…
Saffron Hall, East Anglia’s brightest new star venue on the classical music horizon, is moving with confidence into direct competition with Snape Maltings. Their first fully staged opera, English Touring Opera’s clear and compelling Ulysses’ Homecoming, marked a development from the Saffron Opera Group’s previous concert performances of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre; and, with the…
Handel’s “little opera” Acis and Galatea suffers from something of an identity crisis: it exists in three versions, and has also been put forward as a candidate for at least three genres: masque, opera or serenata. It is certainly an unusual piece: small, with a fast-paced but surprisingly simple plot taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and voiced by the…
Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther pitted religion against Romanticism in a battle royal for the soul of young Germany, which Romanticism won: Werther became a cult hero, even a fashion icon, to generations of Europeans. Oliver Platt’s reduction of Goethe’s aesthetic manifesto to a kitchen sink drama (played throughout in the same shabby kitchen) gives us a…
Ottone was a great success for Handel in his lifetime, and the ravishing beauty of its music and exciting, dynamic plot shows us why. The consistently high production values of English Touring Opera, who make opera always beautiful but relevantly so, without facile aestheticism, breathe glorious life into Ottone, with a wonderful set, stunning costumes…