Britten
Richard Bratby
“The subject is neither political nor religious; it is fantastical” wrote Verdi to the librettist Piave about his opera Macbeth. “The opera is not about the rise of a modern fascist: nor is it about political tyranny. It is a study in character” adds director Elijah Moshinsky in the programme for this opening production of the 2017 Buxton International Festival. To which (at least if your last encounter with Macbeth was Welsh National Opera’s production last year, seemingly set in a Travelodge somewhere near Edinburgh Airport) it’s tempting to respond, for this relief much thanks.Moshinsky Read more ...
Roderick Williams
“So, what do you do for a living?” You might think this question, the mainstay of any polite conversation with a new acquaintance, would be just the moment any opera singer would relish. Here is the chance to declare who we are, what we do, and to bask in some adulation. “An opera singer? No, really? That must be so glamorous…” and so on.That may not necessarily be the case, however, at least not for all of us. I was talking to a soprano colleague the other night and she admitted that she tries to keep her profession out of such a conversation as long as possible. It might be her only chance Read more ...
David Nice
Perfect comedies for the country-house opera scene? Mozart's Figaro and Così, Strauss's Ariadne - and Britten's Albert Herring, now 70 years and a few days old, but as ageless as the rest. With the passing of time it's ever more obvious that this satire of provincial East Anglian tricks and manners also has universal appeal and stands with the best. Eric Crozier was surely Britten's finest librettist once Auden stepped aside after Paul Bunyan, his Da Ponte or Hofmannsthal. The sharp wit of text and music needs absolute focus and playing it as straight as possible. It got both from a splendid Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s all there in the first few bars of Britten’s music – that unsettling tension between beauty and familiarity, and eerie, undefinable otherness. Those cello glissandi might end in glowing major chords, but the tentacle-like slides throw them into doubt. We’re no longer in a binary world of major or minor, but a harmonic landscape of infinite possibility. Netia Jones’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream delights visually in shades of grey, a gorgeous shadow-play of a production, but when she drained her designs of colour she also stripped it from the drama, leaving Britten’s opera a wan reflection Read more ...
Iestyn Davies
Tomorrow Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream will begin a short run at the Snape Maltings, Suffolk in a new production directed by Netia Jones and conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. It will mark the high point of the Aldeburgh Festival’s summer celebrations half a century on from the opening of the Snape Maltings concert hall. It is therefore more than a happy coincidence that back in 1967 the "Dream" was aired as part of the hall’s maiden season.I shall be performing the countertenor role of Oberon. Alongside me will be soprano Sophie Bevan as Tytania, bass Matthew Rose as Bottom, a Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The CBSO is justifiably proud of its association with Benjamin Britten. There’s rather less proof that he reciprocated, dismissing the orchestra as "second-rate" after it premiered his War Requiem in 1962. Throughout the 1950s, he’d repeatedly promised to write an orchestral work for Birmingham, only to renege on the deal after the orchestra’s then chief conductor Rudolf Schwarz moved on to the BBC in 1957. What the CBSO did get from Britten, in September 1954, was the world premiere of an unwieldy Symphonic Suite from what's generally agreed to be one of his patchier operas, the 1953 Read more ...
David Nice
What's not to like, or love, would have to be the sensible response to both the opening programme of Kings Place's year-long Cello Unwrapped festival at Kings Place and its life-enhancing execution. Symmetries abounded – between Alban Gerhardt's double-stopping summons with the "Canto Primo" of Britten's First Cello Suite at the start and his late-night farewell symphony, Kodály's towering Sonata for solo cello; also between two glistening suites for which the label "neo-Baroque" is too narrow, Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin and Stravinsky's Pulcinella. Nicholas Collon and his Aurora players Read more ...
David Nice
"That cursed mist" may hide the French from the crew of the HMS Indomitable and cause far more deadly damage to moral certainty. But clarity and strength are the assets of Orpha Phelan's new production for Opera North: no gimmicks, superb company work and three principals for the battle of good and evil all equal to their dramatic challenges at a level I haven't seen for decades.Britten and his co-librettists EM Forster and Eric Crozier pose some challenges in their adaptation of Melville's story, all well handled here: there's a bit too much moralising, especially about avenging angels and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Owen Wingrave is the Britten opera that always comes with a caveat, an apology. Dramatically flawed (a problem partially, but by no means entirely, accounted for by its genesis as a television opera) and musically uneven, it has nevertheless emerged recently as a favourite choice for young singers, with Guildhall (2013), the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2016) and now British Youth Opera (2016) all choosing to stage it, with varying degrees of success.Owen, last of the soldiering clan of the Wingraves, leaves officer training, casting his family’s history aside in favour of an avowed Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is too other-worldly to have anything as mortal as a musical heartbeat. Pulsing through it instead are musical quivers, jolts of eerie energy first heard in the opening cello glissandi. Denaturing the instrument, transforming it from a voice so nearly human to one of harmonic and textural androgyny, Britten cuts away the safety cables of Shakespeare’s framing court scenes, plunging his young lovers straight into the fairy forest where anything is possible and nothing is as it seems. As a theatrical sleight of hand it’s almost impossible to match, but Peter Read more ...
David Nice
As the hand-held credits popped up on screen to pianist and musical director Manoj Kamps's superb quartet arrangement of Mozart's Magic Flute Overture, the European Union's Culture Programme logo brought a spontaneous burst of applause. Not the norm for Suffolk this week, I'm told, but this audience knew how international opera is, how we're all connected in Europe's musical world.A year and a half after its inception as a collaboration between the Aix-en-Provence Festival and the European Network of Opera Academies – I was there at the very first meeting but had not seen the show until last Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Memo to self: never read the director’s programme essay. Jacob Dorrell, director of the University of Birmingham’s summer production of Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera at the Barber Institute, explains: “I wanted to bring to the Barber stage a community of people one would never expect to appear in an opera: today’s working-class community.” Dorrell is a young director, early in his career, so let’s leave aside the fact that his vision of “today’s working-class community” – a world of jeggings, leopard print, trackie bottoms and midriff-baring maternity wear – seems to come out of Coronation Read more ...