Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | The Fairy Queen

A rare 17th-century English Baroque spectacular, designed to delight the Restoration crowd, is given a contemporary twist in Sydney. 

The Toronto Summer Music Festival opens with Les Arts Florissants’ enchanting performance of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, featuring the singers of Le Jardin des voix and the dancers of Compagnie Käfig.

Polly Graham's production turns semi-opera into “three-quarters opera”, to good effect.

At the Theater an der Wien, director Mariame Clément and novelist Lucy Wadham have crafted innovative material that brings the old-fashioned lyrics to life in a coherent and contemporary dramatic setting.

Eschewing conventions throughout, Daisy Evans' production of The Fairy Queen walks boldly out of the woods into an exciting future for opera staging.

An especially adapted version of Purcell's Fairy Queen, reworked by Timothy Nelson, inspires an exceptional reading from a talented young cast at Iford. 

The ‘semi-opera’ was an English musical and spoken theatre hybrid which by the end of the 17th century had begun to scrape the bottom of Restoration drama’s literary barrel, and by the 18th had been rendered obsolete by efforts to introduce the English to formal opera from the continent.

Purcell’s The Fairy Queen is a tricky thing to stage. It’s not an opera, with its own story-line, but a masque, a series of musical interludes intended to slot into a performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One solution could be just to perform it in concert, but the music is so dramatic that it lends itself wonderfully to stage action.

A career woman, a femme fatale, a shop girl, an actor, a teacher, an idler, a biker, a priest, a bank clerk and five circus acrobats. These are not the figures that come to mind when we think of Purcell’s Fairy Queen.

Un montaje semiescenificado de The Fairy Queen complementó una brillante ejecución tanto instrumental como vocal bajo la atenta dirección de William Christie.

Bei Christie und Merzouki verschwammen die inneren und äußeren Grenzen der Rollen und Stile, um eine unvergessliche Gemeinschaft eines fabelhaften, zeitlosen Feengartens zu schaffen.

The King's Consort realizan un viaje por el siglo XVII inglés, con música escrita en torno a las obras de Shakespeare.