In the first of its opera productions this season, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama presented an interesting combination of Stravinsky's odd little comedy, Mavra and Tchaikovsky's tale of the blind princess, Iolanta.
In this double bill, we get a violently enthusiastic little farce from Donizetti which, though fiery, is definitely not his best work; but next, we are treated to the revival of a brilliant, beautiful one-act opera by Malcolm Arnold.
For the first time in the Proms' history, the programme for the first of this season's Late Nights included the premiere of A Man from the Future, a groundbreaking new piece about codebreaker Alan Turing.
The future of opera is in good hands, if Tuesday night’s opening of Jonathan Dove's The Adventures of Pinocchio at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama is any indication.
A double bill of rare operas: it’s like Christmas has come early in London. The Guildhall School are pairing Debussy’s The Prodigal Son with Donizetti’s sparkling court comedy Francesca di Foix.
I’m sure before long I’ll see a production of Daisy Pulls It Off that opens with modern day soldiers charging onto the stage waving rifles about – it seems to be the first image directors reach for these days.
Despite a relatively easy-to-follow storyline, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro is an opera that is hard to pull off entirely successfully. Musically, it requires enormous vigour from both cast and orchestra; dramatically, this opera buffa demands strong acting skills in order to eke out its moments of farce.
A handful of times in operatic history, a composer has thrown away the rule book and produced a work which defies categorisation because it simply isn't like anything else in the repertoire. Kurt Weill's Die Dreigroschenoper is one such work: musically and dramatically, neither Weill himself or anyone else has ever written anything remotely similar.
