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: Martha Jones
La Traviata, English National Opera, ENO, London Coliseum, March 2018
Posted on 17 March 2018Mirrors and bright lights in the party scenes contrast with the tranquillity of a country garden in early Act II and the bleak feeling of a cemetery where Violetta digs her own grave in Act III. With designs ranging from fin de siècle Paris to the glitter of modern Las Vegas, Daniel Kramer in his …
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 …
Life on the Moon, English Touring Opera, ETO, October 2014
Posted on 18 October 2014This is all huge fun and the packed audience at London’s Hackney Empire clearly loved the staging of this Haydn opera by comedy specialist Cal McCrystal. The plot is simple; a wealthy but miserly widower named Buonafede (good faith), superbly sung by Andrew Slater, is tricked into giving dowries to his daughter and his maid …
Albert Herring, English Touring Opera, ETO, Linbury Studio, Covent Garden, October 2012
Posted on 7 October 2012This delightful comic opera by Benjamin Britten creates a deftly woven musical tapestry performed by thirteen instrumentalists and roughly the same number of singers. Eric Crozier based his libretto on a tale by Guy de Maupassant, transferring it to a Suffolk town and creating a glorious critique of small town mentality, pomposity and sexual repression. …