Tag Archives: Christopher Ainslie
Posted on 21 June 2019
A terrific home run for the Grange Festival in Hampshire, where since taking over in 2017 counter-tenor Michael Chance has encouraged superb productions of opera from the baroque period. This year was the turn of Handel’s oratorio Belshazzar, never before professionally staged in this country. See my review in The Article.
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Posted on 9 June 2018
Agrippina, wife of the emperor Claudius (Claudio), is bent on securing the throne for Nero (Nerone), her son by a previous marriage. A scheming woman who manipulates her spiritually weak husband and everyone around her, she finds herself out-manoeuvred by the pretty Poppea, desired by Claudio and Nerone, to say nothing of her beloved Ottone …
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Posted on 2 March 2018
Christopher Alden’s previous production, dragged down by its undertow of sexual abuse, has been abandoned and English National Opera has put the fairy magic back into Britten’s opera by returning to the earlier Robert Carson staging, last seen here in 2004. The result brings joy to the heart as the blundering Puck of Miltos Yerolemou …
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Posted on 4 May 2014
For his first opera, composer Julian Anderson demonstrates huge chutzpah in combining Sophocles’ three Theban plays (Oedipus the King/ Oedipus at Colonus/ Antigone) into a single evening of opera. The plays were not written in the chronological order of their events, and nor does Anderson take them in that order, ending with Colonus, written shortly …
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Posted on 1 March 2014
First performed in 1725 this Handel opera, set in seventh century Milan, boasted the famous castrato Senesino as Berterido, husband of Rodelinda. He has lost his throne, is now presumed dead, and his position has been usurped by Grimoaldo, who has fallen in love with Rodelinda, despite being betrothed to Berterido’s sister Eduige. Tastes have …
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Posted on 26 May 2012
Caligula ruled for just under four years (AD 37–41) before being assassinated at the age of 28. He was the emperor who threatened to make his horse a consul, simply to mock the subservience of the aristocracy, and when one sycophant proffered his own life should the emperor recover from illness, Caligula took it from …
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