Mainly Opera and Ballet
English Touring Opera is a gem of a company. It creates sensible productions and tours them widely from Exeter to Durham. This review covers Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims. Unable to afford big name directors who sometimes bend the original creation to their will, ETO gives us what the composer intended, allowing …
Premiered in February 1933, Kurt Weill’s Silbersee gives an insight into the Germany in which Hitler had just come to power. It is a story of guilt, remorse, anger, resentment, and ultimately redemption, superbly brought to life in James Conway’s theatrically sensitive production — see my review in The Article.
This triple bill is aptly titled, starting as it does with the bouncy laziness of a summer’s day in the 1930s before World War II, and ending with David Bintley’s excellent Flowers of the Forest, whose two parts contrast light with darkness, to music by Arnold and Britten. The hedonism of La Fin du Jour …
It’s a pleasure to see English Touring Opera in London, and know that they will be taking this delightful production to other cities. It deserves to be a sell-out everywhere.
One might expect an operatic treatment of King Lear to be of Wagnerian proportions, yet Alexander Goehr’s version lasts only one and three quarter hours, including an interval.
The cast seemed very much in tune with [Sensorium], and Melissa Hamilton was simply wonderful. It’s astonishing that she’s a mere 21 years old.
