Mainly Opera and Ballet
This new production by the Welsh National Opera portrays Grimes, brilliantly performed by Nicky Spence, as a bully. Brutal but with a hugely vulnerable side that is desperate for the love of the young widow Ellen Orford. She would take him in a heartbeat, but he insists on acquiring the respect of the local community …
In Spring last year at the new Sam Wanamaker Theatre the Royal Opera put on Cavalli’s L’Ormindo, one of the earliest operas ever performed in a public opera house (the San Cassiano in Venice). This year they have reached further back to 1607, a time before public opera houses existed, performing Monteverdi’s Orfeo at Camden …
This extraordinary one-act opera was composed in the Nazi concentration camp Terezin (Theresienstadt), located in what is now the Czech Republic near the German border. Its composer Viktor Ullmann (1898–1944), born in a small town near the meeting point of what is now the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia, was a serious musician who had …
