Opera Features
New Year Brantub - Free Tickets CompetitionThursday, 29 December 2011
Competition alert! Start 2012 with a surprise arts trip. On theartsdesk we love crossing the borders - "Surprise me," was the edict of the great impresario of theatre, music, art and dance, Serge Diaghilev, and it's one we hold to here, because we believe in the pleasure of surprises. So please enter our competition, and a pair of tickets to one of the splendid events listed below could be coming your way, but you will take pot luck with which one you win, and who knows? Read more...
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theartsdesk Christmas QuizSunday, 25 December 2011
You're going to test your stomach and sweet temper to the maximum today - test your brain and memory too with our monster quiz about the arts covered by theartsdesk in 2011. Every artform is represented here in 12 dozen questions. Settle down between courses, films and presents and see how many you and your near and dear can do. Read more... |
theartsdesk Christmas Quiz - AnswersSunday, 25 December 2011
Here are the answers to our monster Christmas arts quiz of 12 dozen questions on the year past, as seen by theartsdesk writers. There are clues in all the questions in the main quiz page. If you don't want to know the answers just yet till you've grappled with them, close this page now. Read more... |
Christmas on theartsdesk: Brainteasers, Bran Tub, and the Best of 2011Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Any day now most of us will be hunkering down and for the most part drawing a curtain about the world outside. Before that happens, we’d like to tell you about theartsdesk’s plans for Christmas and the New Year. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Wexford: Wexford Festival Opera's 60th Anniversary SeasonSunday, 13 November 2011
I’m within 20 yards of Wexford Opera House when I stop a couple for directions, convinced that my map is some sort of Irish practical joke. Approached down a narrow and frankly rather unpromising side street, from the exterior Wexford Opera House does a very good impression of a row of terraced houses. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Bayreuth: Wagner in the LaboratorySaturday, 13 August 2011
Richard Wagner has probably only himself to blame if his operas have become a laboratory for the testing-to-destruction of the intellectual preoccupations of that Opera Führer of our time, the stage director. Wagner it was, after all, who transferred the mythic concept of concealed meaning to the opera house: Wagner who recreated legend as psycho-social allegory, and made musical narrative the handmaiden of philosophy and political ideology. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Buxton Festival: An Opera a DayTuesday, 19 July 2011
An opera a day keeps boredom at bay. There’s no danger of boredom in Buxton in mid-July. Set 1,000ft up in the Derbyshire hills, on the edge of the Peak District, and blessed with an Edwardian gem of an opera house, the old spa town is now well established with its own place on the festival map. And when the sun shines on it, as it did for most of the first day, it’s a picture. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Göttingen: Handel With an UmlautSunday, 12 June 2011
Georg Friedrich Händel of Halle probably never came here. Other great men certainly did: long after the official foundation of Göttingen's Georg August University in 1734 - the year in which the composer wrote a masterpiece, Ariodante, in another spa town, Tunbridge Wells - would-be or successful students included Goethe, Heine, the Brothers Grimm, Schopenhauer and Bismarck. It's hardly a Baroque town, either, though its beauties are manifold. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Clonter: The Opera FarmSaturday, 07 May 2011
Deep in rural Cheshire farmland, music is in the air. It’s not the music of the spheres from the Jodrell Bank radio telescope nearby, nor even the sound of the birds and the bleating of the lambs nearby. It is the music of human voices at work on scales and operatic arias. The 250-acre farm is Clonter, where for years people used to come to be entertained in the barn while picnicking amid bales of straw. Now the barn’s converted into an opera theatre - "the Glyndebourne of the North". Read more... |
Year Out/Year In: Classical Music and OperaFriday, 31 December 2010
Earlier this month, George Osborne, Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt were spotted in a Royal Opera House box surveying the country's most expensive artistic patrimony. What they thought - and how they and the Arts Council might wield their axe - will change the musical landscape of Britain forever. Read more... |
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