Brian Butler meets international opera sensation Nicky Spence
Brian Butler meets international opera sensation Nicky Spence
This haunting performance of Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony is a startlingly but soothing staging from the ENO yet again showing us what a dedicated team of people can do with imagination, flair and a determination to explore and share the very best of music with a diverse and invested audience.
A successful night and a polished introduction to a remodelled Yeoman. Offering a fine evening of nostalgic semi-serious opera with its heart of G&S essential silliness maintained.
In the first of two articles, Brian Butler surveys a feast of queer theatre coming soon
Le Gateau Chocolat is one of the UK’s leading drag performers.
‘Classical Notes’: Nick Boston tunes into the best classical music in May Gscene
Has your dog got star quality? If your pet pooch is the canine equivalent of Brad Pitt or Scarlett Johansson, then they could win a place in the spotlight in the beautiful and romantic opera La Bohème,
By avoiding real gore and giving us my little decapitated pony cartoon gooey gore we are forced to confront our own desires, our own expectations and here director Adena Jacobs’s new production for English National Opera has done something interesting. He’s given Salomé back her dignity, twisted, death obsessed, vain and impulsive she may be, but here she’s in control of it all. The others are all her toys, to play with, pull apart, or avoid being played with. She’s defiant and threatening, abused and abusive, swinging her aluminium baseball bat, making it clear she’s as much pitcher as catcher. It’s all about the gaze in the end, the ones not given and the ones stolen without permission. She’s the one to decide who gets satisfied and if it’s not to be her, then none of us will get any.
Daughter. Liar. Wife. Thief. She has been running for so long, no one knows the real Marnie, least of all herself.
A world premiere opera from composer Nico Muhly, with a libretto by Nicholas Wright, Marnie is based on the novel by Winston Graham although alludes to the Hitchcock film. It examines the cost of freedom, the limitations of forgiveness and the impossibility of escaping the past, in Muhly’s explosive music that is direct and powerful.
With some charming walk on by local young people and children from The Theatre Workshop this was a lovely engaging piece of opera presented in Ms Kent’s trademark way, lot’s of drama, quality singing and an intimate feeling of seeing good opera done in a straight foreword way
