Opera Features
First Persons: Glyndebourne's sustainability advisers Sara and Jeremy Eppel on creating eco-friendly operaTuesday, 23 August 2022
Like the beacons saving ships from the Cornish rocks in Ethel Smyth’s opera, The Wreckers, which opened this year’s Glyndebourne Festival, the Sussex opera house has itself become a beacon of more environmentally sustainable opera. In 2021, with the COP 26 Climate Change Conference raising the profile of businesses’ efforts to cut their carbon emissions, Glyndebourne was a pioneer among opera houses and joined the global Race to Zero. Read more...
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First Person: Michael Volpe on the utopian thinking behind his new If Opera companySaturday, 20 August 2022
“But what’s in it for you?”. It was a simple enough question, asked by an accomplished opera singer. It stemmed from hearing that the new version of the Iford Arts opera company I was running was aiming for a different kind of guiding philosophy: it would have a repertory ensemble, who would be paid weekly wages and would work under a clearly defined code of conduct that placed them front and centre of our organisation, attempting to return agency to them. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Zurich - forging a brilliant new RingTuesday, 28 June 2022
Could this be the summer Bayreuth finally sees a new Ring production that comes anywhere near its last great epic success, Harry Kupfer’s, which ran from 1988-92? If so, it’s been pipped to the post by a rather more comfortable and bijou opera house on the other side of the lake to the refuges where Wagner worked on more masterpieces – beautiful sites both, even if the “asyl” next to the Villa Wesendonck is no more.. Read more... |
'How that music was created remains to me a complete mystery': John Tomlinson on fellow Lancastrian Harrison BirtwistleFriday, 20 May 2022
It has been a difficult couple of years for us in the world of opera, losing several of our most respected and admired colleagues who have inspired us over several decades. Read more... |
First Person: Femi Elufowoju Jr. on directing Verdi's 'Rigoletto'Thursday, 20 January 2022
I find that my experience of living as a Black man in the UK cannot help but inform the way I approach my work and never more so than with Verdi’s Rigoletto. Read more... |
First Persons: Susan Bullock, Gerald Finley and Stephen Higgins on a 'Bluebeard's Castle' with a differenceThursday, 04 November 2021
Tonight a version of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle launches in the intimate surroundings of Stone Nest, a former Welsh chapel in London's West End. Its conductor along with soprano Susan Bullock and baritone Gerald FInley, alternating in the roles of Judith and Bluebeard with Gweneth Ann Rand and Michael Mayes, discuss its special claim on our attention. Read more... |
'Everyone who played for him always gave their very best': remembering Bernard Haitink (1929-2021)Tuesday, 02 November 2021
Few musicians get to stage-manage a dignified departure from the world. Read more... |
Royal Opera House lullabies for Little AmalTuesday, 26 October 2021
“I want to tell her that people will be good,” Tewodros Aregawe of Phosphoros Theatre confided to us as Little Amal closed her eyes on the giant bed made up for her in the Paul Hamlyn Hall, “that all the people with kind eyes who have walked alongside her and listened to her story will be louder than those who wish she wasn’t there”. Read more... |
'Rest now, you God': remembering bass-baritone Norman Bailey (1933-2021)Friday, 24 September 2021
Few singers really change your life. Norman Bailey did that for me [writes David Nice of theartsdesk]. Read more... |
Summer seasons in a Covid world: five opera company movers and shakers reflectTuesday, 14 September 2021
The bleakest time of all for live music during the Covid crisis came in the first four and a half months of this year. Read more... |
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