Mainly Opera and Ballet
This is the first time Glyndebourne have staged Tosca, and the production by Ted Huffman has given us the “shabby little shocker” a critic in the 1950s once called it. Here is a military dictatorship that kills people in cold blood, and though the ending is different from the one Puccini intended, glorious singing and …
This was a new production featuring some excellent singing, particularly in the roles of Tatyana, Lensky and Prince Gremin, but the staging was very dull. A white stage with almost no props may emphasise the emptiness of Onegin’s life, but gives little to the audience — see my review in The Article.
This Cavalli opera, Giasone in Italian, was followed a couple of years later by La Calisto, which the Royal Opera produced for the first time in autumn 2008. Both feature characters from classical mythology engaging in emotional and sexual liaisons, which somehow manage to end in harmony after complications and frustrations attendant on the rambunctious …
Just after Christmas in the year 1900 a steamer went to the Flannan Islands Lighthouse bringing a keeper to relieve one of the three keepers already there. The Flannan Isles are a lonely spot beyond the Outer Hebrides, and when the steamer arrived the three keepers had vanished into thin air. What happened? This remarkable …
