Day: 19 August 2025
Waterperry Opera Festival 2025 – Semele, Don Giovanni, A World Turned Upside Down
**** Handel’s Semele was an excellent choice for the always surpring Waterperry Opera Festival. The exquisite Waterperry Garden’s offered Handel’s drama an environment in which music, myth, and landscape coalesced to stirring effect. The open air lent freshness to the score, while the transition from daylight to dusk mirrored the opera’s descent from playful seduction…
Mad about children, Verdi’s Macbeth at Salzburg Festival
**** In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the tyrant reflects on his wife’s death with the immortal words: “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is tempting to dismiss Verdi’s Macbeth as staged by Krzysztof Warlikowski at the Salzburg Festival, with Shakespeare’s famous line about “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It was a powerful evening of theatre yet there…