Here, I post my reviews and document my love of opera. I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to comment on any of my posts or contact me if you wish to.
Have a nice stay!
David Buchler
All tagged Nicky Spence
The stage was set, the audience ready, with plenty of children watching in the matinee performance, all ready in anticipation of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, written by the Irish Composer Gerald Barry, with staging by Anthony McDonald.
For more than 20 years the Samling Institute for Young Artists has brought together emerging singers together with international artists who act as a bridge and tutor between the conclusion of studies and the beginning of professional life. The roster of Samling Artists who have forged an incredible professional life is impressive and this year the score of wonderful musical talent is unlikely to disappoint.
The fourth of ENO’s contrasting Orpheus myth operas is perhaps its strongest. Philp Glass’s Orphee based on Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film is directed by Netia Jones with vivid modern black and white set designs by Lizzie Clachan. Lucy Carter is an outstanding Lighting Designer with the necessary choreography by Danielle Agami.
Gosh, how depressing! Leos Janacek wrote his opera, From the House of the Dead, in the year of his death in 1928. The opera is effectively a play within a play, set in a Siberian prison, where individual prisoners narrate episodes of their lives.
Alban Berg’s work Lulu is rarely performed. With Schoenberg as a teacher, the music from this second Viennese composer is 12 note music and atonal. The opera was left unfinished at Berg’s death in 1935 and the complete opera was not performed in its entirety until 1979 when the Paris Opera, under the baton of Pierre Boulez, brought the whole 3 acts to a wider audience.
