Author: Mike Smith
Mid Wales Opera Shakespeare season against backdrop of funding axe
9th October 2023Mid Wales Opera are back on the road this season with two Shakespearean operas. In March next year the company presents its first ever production of Verdi’s great masterpiece Macbeth. Before that, this autumn, the company presents Berlioz’s effervescent Beatrice and Benedict, based on Shakespeare’s comedy Much ado about nothing. However, the tour comes against […]
Read More
Swansea City Opera’s new chamber opera Shoulder to Shoulder
9th October 2023Swansea City Opera’s new chamber opera Shoulder to Shoulder will tour in November with a five-strong cast. It has been created through Swansea City Opera’s partnership with the charity Men’s Sheds Cymru, which develops social groups for older men. Through interviews with Shedders, as members of Sheds are known, the Artistic Director of Swansea City […]
Read More
Mid Wales Opera has lost its £107k annual funding from the Arts Council of Wales.
28th September 2023In a hammer blow to opera in Wales and to Welsh singers, Mid Wales Opera has lost its £107k annual funding from the Arts Council of Wales. It is understood the decision could also mean the loss of the £99.5k the innovative small venue stiurign company receive through the Creatve arts scheme. This is awarded […]
Read More
Welsh National Opera says Arts Council allocation 10% below standstill funding
28th September 2023While Welsh National Opera has again received the largest single Arts Council of Wales funding allocation, the company says it amounts to a 10 per cent cut against its application for standstill funding. The company had applied for £4.5m but as part of Arts Council Wales’s Investment Review, it has received a conditional offer of £4.1m […]
Read More
Mark Doss talks about his career and singing Giorgio Germont in La Traviata with Welsh National Opera
14th September 2023Mark Doss sings Giorgio Germont in Verdi’s La Traviata which opens at Wales Millennium Centre on September 21 and tours to Llandudno, Bristol, Plymouth, Birmingham, Milton Keynes, Southampton Mike Smith: Can you tell me how you first came to work with WNO and what was that experience like compared to, say, work in the US? […]
Read More
English Touring Opera new season announced
13th September 2023English Touring Opera (ETO) has announced its Autumn tour as an exploration of themes of love, power and how the two interact. There will be two brand-new productions of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea and Rossini’sCinderella. The first tour to be programmed by General Director Robin Norton-Hale since taking upthe role in January this year, […]
Read More
Jennifer Smith to stand down as Executive Director of Longborough Festival Opera
13th September 2023Jennifer Smith is standing down as Executive Director of Longborough Festival. She will be taking on the role of Domestic Bursar at Balliol College. Smith took up the post of Executive Director in 2014. Under her leadership, Longborough Festival Opera has undergone a period of significant expansion. Alongside operational changes, the charity’s turnover has grown […]
Read More
Sublime theatre and music, Ainadamar, WNO, WMC
10th September 2023***** At the end of the performance of Osvaldo Golijov’s opera Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears) I felt surprisingly moved by this new work from the Argentinian composer that focusses on the murder of the poet Lorca during the Spanish Civil War. I am still not sure whether it was the music and singing or the […]
Read More
Not just any old port in the storm, Les Troyens at the Proms, Albert Hall
5th September 2023**** It should be of no concern to this review why the conductor and the singer performing Narbal were not who was originally scheduled to perform. There is plenty reportage of this elsewhere. Anyone interested will know, and I was more concerned with the annoying distractions of the audience (some unavoidable with some of the […]
Read More
The Mikado fun but without much bite, If Opera
1st September 2023This evening entertainment at If Opera’s summer festival, an offering of this Charles Court Opera version of The Mikado, was well-received by the audience. Judging by judicious eavesdropping, the audience members particularly enjoyed the humour and did not seem phased by the transposition of the Gilbert and Sullivan story to an all-British group of colonial […]
Read More