Author: Mike Smith
The Grange Festival 2022 season details
Booking is open for The Grange Festival’s 2022 season. The Hampshire festival opens with Verdi’s Macbeth, on Thursday 9 June and followed a day later by Handel’s Tamerlano, These works are followed by Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard in late June. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra accompanies these three new productions as part…
Royal Opera announces 11 new productions in 2022-23 season
The Royal Opera 2021-22 season features 11 new productions including Verdi, Berg, Dvořák and Handel. These include Kaija Saariaho’s new opera Innocence – based on Sofi Oksanen’s novel and staged by theatre director Simon Stone. For a new production of Rusalka, Asmik Grigorian returns to perform the title role, joining British artists Sarah Connolly, David…
New commission from Opera Holland Park
Opera Holland Park has announced a new commission and world premiere for 2023: Itch. described as an operatic thriller with a most unusual hero. Based on Simon Mayo’s bestselling novels Itch and Itch Rocks, composer Jonathan Dove, above, and librettist Alasdair Middleton have been commissioned to create a new opera for Opera Holland Park. Its hero is Itchingham…
A joyous The Gondoliers from Scottish Opera at Hackney Empire
The overarching feeling of Scottish Opera’s The Gondoliers at London’s Hackney Empire is joyful exuberance. It sounds a fanfare for the pleasure of live performance returning after the long darkness of this dreadful pandemic; a splendidly staged, marvellously sung and genuinely funny evening of Gilbert & Sullivan. The opera has particular interest to aficionados, the…
ENGLISH TOURING OPERA NEW GENERAL DIRECTOR
English Touring Opera has appointed Robin Norton-Hale as General Director. Norton-Hale, who is a multi award-winning writer and director for theatre, opera and film, will take up the position from July 2022. She joins ETO from OperaUpClose, where she is Artistic Director & Chief Executive, having co-founded the company in 2009.The company’s Board of Directors…
Don Giovanni, to hell and back
Don GiovanniWelsh National OperaWales Millennium Centre By Mike Smith The concept behind this take on the Mozart moral tale is Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, a monolithic bronze works, with human figures cast into the metal – as becomes the fate of the great seducer Don Giovanni. Figures from the vast masterpiece were also created…
Nevill Holt La Boheme and Barber for 2022
Nevill Holt Opera’s Artistic Director Nicholas Chalmers will conduct Puccini’s La bohéme this June. The director is Mathilda du Tillieul McNicol who was the Assistant Director of NHO’s La traviata in 2021, and the designer will be Linbury Prize winner Basia Bińkowska. Manchester Camerata will bring the score to life. The role of Mimì will…
Life’s a beach on Alcina’s love island
It is intriguing that a wave of Alcinas is hitting our opera houses. Opera North has dived in first with a pared down Handelian adventure for this Baroque menage or menagerie a cinq on the sorceress’ love island. Characters wonder on stage and wonder off again, usually after singing but not always, and there is…
Singing soars above what risks being a one trick zebra
I have had a Jon Snow moment, watching a production that is based on one premiss, black people can be vulnerable outsiders, surrounded by as far as I can see virtually an overwhelmingly white audience. I am not sure what that says about opera or about its reach, but I also suspect that applying a…
Opera North new season dates
Questions of power and identity, love and loss, will be coming to theatres across the North of England in the new year as Opera North opens its winter season with two new productions, while also offering another chance to see its new production of Carmen which premiered in September. Wagner’s Parsifal follows in June, with…