As I alight from the train at Macclesfield and scramble into the back of the taxi which will take me on the 20-minute journey across the Pennines to Buxton and its eponymous festival, the driver announces with grim satisfaction, “I am now going to take you on one of the most dangerous roads in Britain.”
opera features
Ismene Brown
Get your tent and ice-box and plan your summer's entertainment with theartsdesk's definitive clickable festival guide - listings and links for all the UK festivals this summer, from heavy rock by Scottish lochs to Morris-dancing in the south west, and taking on opera, classical and major international arts festivals for good measure. If you know of a festival we've missed, please email info@theartsdesk.com with brief details of venue, booked artists and the website and we'll put it in for the world to see.
edward.seckerson
Christophe Rousset - master harpsichordist, conductor and musical archeologist - was once described by the Guardian as "music's greatest mischief-maker". He took it as a compliment. In 1991 he founded the stunningly virtuosic period instrument group Les Talens Lyriques and together they have trawled the archives in search of the forgotten composers and forgotten repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries - contemporaries of giants like Mozart and Handel who in their day were often more famous and more successful than the greats they inspired. Composers like Martin y Soler, Cimarosa, Jommelli, Traetta, and, of course, his compatriot Lully. In this exclusive audio podcast Rousset talks in his Paris apartment between performances of Handel's Semele.
Christophe Rousset - master harpsichordist, conductor and musical archeologist - was once described by the Guardian as "music's greatest mischief-maker". He took it as a compliment. In 1991 he founded the stunningly virtuosic period instrument group Les Talens Lyriques and together they have trawled the archives in search of the forgotten composers and forgotten repertoire of the 17th and 18th centuries - contemporaries of giants like Mozart and Handel who in their day were often more famous and more successful than the greats they inspired. Composers like Martin y Soler, Cimarosa, Jommelli, Traetta, and, of course, his compatriot Lully. In this exclusive audio podcast Rousset talks in his Paris apartment between performances of Handel's Semele.
edward.seckerson
Edward Gardner is no longer English National Opera's best kept secret. The former choral scholar and repetiteur goes from strength to strength helming ENO through productive and interesting times. The world's stages are now beckoning. During a break in final rehearsals for Mozart's great opera seria Idomeneo in a new production from multi-media queen Katie Mitchell he talks informally about what being music director of a company like this entails.
rebecca.ritzel
To get a feel for whether an arts festival has truly penetrated a city’s psyche, it helps to strike up a conversation with local Starbucks baristas. That’s why I was grateful to be asked one recent evening in Toronto, “So what exactly is Luminato?”As the green-aproned server handed me a post-show cup of tea, I thought, good question: what is Luminato? Four years after the festival’s founding, it seems many Toronto residents remain unsure. I explained that it’s an arts festival with many different events, including performances at nearby theatres. As it happens, I had just come from a Luminato show featuring the actor John Malkovich.
edward.seckerson
The Classical Opera Company does exactly what it says on the tin and over the last few years has refreshed parts of the repertoire and corners of the nation that their bigger and more illustrious counterparts never reach. Conductor and artistic director Ian Page talks about questions of style, untapped repertoire and major restorations, like the company's recent staging of Thomas Arne's Artexerxes and its current labour of love rebuilding Mozart's unfinished opera Zaide. The opera now has a third act thanks to Ian's judicious plundering of Wolfgang Amadeus's bottom drawer and a new text from poet Michael Symmons Roberts and playwright Ben Power in collaboration with director Melly "Coram Boy" Still.
edward.seckerson
Acclaimed British mezzo Sarah Connolly prepares for the title role in Donizetti's battle royal of rival queens Maria Stuarda. Her return to Opera North in the bel cantorole of her choice will be one of the highlights of the UK opera season and in this revealing podcast she gives fascinating insight into her extensive preparation and "anatomisation" of the roles she performs - right down to the fine detailing here of Mary's temperament and bearing, and even her height.
What is going through her head in the moments before the "confrontation" which in reality never actually took place? What finally provoked her in the moment she floors Elizabeth I with her "royal bastard" insult? And what must have she been feeling as they built the scaffold outside her prison room at Fotheringay Castle? Connolly leaves nothing unexplored. The inside of her score is a written chronicle of what is required to get inside Mary's head...before she loses it.
edward.seckerson
She was the Tosca who played live to an audience of one billion in 107 countries; she is the director of English National Opera's new staging of the opera they once dubbed Puccini's "shabby little shocker". How times change. In this exclusive ENO podcast, Catherine Malfitano says that it's high time we moved on from the Tosca-as-diva portrayal - that, she says, should remain offstage where Puccini left it.
David Nice
Venezuela's joyful musical education programme known as El Sistema is the phenomenon of the age, the success story that many western countries now seek to replicate. And that's great. But Britain, for a start, might re-engage its own back-to-basics in music quicker by looking closer to home and seeing how Finland does it. In a small population, every child has free access to an instrument until secondary school.