Così fan tutte, English Touring Opera, ETO, Hackney Empire, March 2020
Posted on 9 March 2020A delightful production in bright colours with a very fine young cast, all under the baton Holly Mathieson. My review in The Article.
Tag Archives: Mark Howland
Ulysses’ Homecoming, English Touring Opera, ETO, Hackney Empire, October 2016
Posted on 16 October 2016The text for this 1640 opera was written specially to attract the 73-year old Monteverdi to Venice, where opera had gone public for the first time just three years earlier. It is a remarkable work based on the second half of Homer’s Odyssey, starting with the Phaecians taking the hero back to Ithaca after 20 …
The Tales of Hoffmann, English Touring Opera, ETO, Britten Theatre, RCM, October 2015
Posted on 10 October 2015Offenbach’s greatest work, which he regarded as a last chance for recognition as a composer of serious opera, remained incomplete at his death in autumn 1880. Its main character Hoffmann — jurist, composer, critic, cartoonist, and author of fantastic tales that form the basis for Nutcracker, Coppelia and Schumann’s Kreisleriana — himself became a character …
The Wild Man of the West Indies, English Touring Opera, ETO, Hackney Empire, March 2015
Posted on 13 March 2015This opera, mixing tragic and comic elements, has a Shakespearean tinge in the relationship of its main character Cardenio to a local slave named Kaidamà, like King Lear and his fool, though the ending is pure Donizetti. The back-story is that the unfaithfulness of Cardenio’s wife Eleonora — with his brother Fernando to boot — …