Month: April 2026
The Flying Dutchman, WNO
How do you adapt The Flying Dutchman for 2026? Wagner’s shortest opera is not a frequent flyer to contemporary stages, perhaps, for understandable reasons; it is deeply steeped in the Romantic iconography and storytelling, with a pervasive undertone of Christian moralising that doesn’t help things at all, and thus may sound alien to a contemporary…
Decline of WNO reflected by meagre new season
Cash-strapped Welsh National Opera has announced its 80th anniversary season with just one full opera, a double bill, a chamber-scale work, a children’s show and family concert, and a Welsh language joint theatre venture. The announcement comes as the company looks for a new musical director to replace Tomáš Hanus. The new season understandably…
Mid Wales Opera Dido and Aenaes OpenStages production
n the luminous stone sanctuary of 11th-century Brecon Cathedral, listening to one of opera’s earliest masterpieces, it was hard not to reflect on how unforgiving the 21st century has been to the art form. Yet Mid Wales Opera’s OpenStages production of Dido and Aeneas offered something increasingly rare in our cultural life: not merely reassurance,…