Author: Mike Smith
Mid Wales Opera has lost its £107k annual funding from the Arts Council of Wales.
In 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…
Welsh National Opera says Arts Council allocation 10% below standstill funding
While 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…
Mark Doss talks about his career and singing Giorgio Germont in La Traviata with Welsh National Opera
Mark 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?…
English Touring Opera new season announced
English 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,…
Jennifer Smith to stand down as Executive Director of Longborough Festival Opera
Jennifer 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…
Sublime theatre and music, Ainadamar, WNO, WMC
***** 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…
Not just any old port in the storm, Les Troyens at the Proms, Albert Hall
**** 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…
The Mikado fun but without much bite, If Opera
This 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…
Luscious and powerful Fedora at If Opera
***** Again, If Opera punches above its weight with this luscious and powerfully sung Fedora, an oddly underperformed opera by Umberto Giordano that on the evidence of this outing deserves to be taken on by other opera companies. Charne Rochford Yes, it has the usual operatic excesses of verismo opera, and Act One in particular,…
Never ending story, Tristan und Isolde, Bayreuth Festival
Now in its second season at this Wagnerian wonderland, director Roland Schwab’s Tristan und Isolde has again proven to be a favourite of the Bayreuth audience and this year – and that is without the context of contrasting with a seemingly deeply unpopular production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. There is always the risk with…