Opera North – Britten: Peter Grimes, at Leeds Grand Theatre 19 and 21 February
The celebrated musicologist, Hans Keller, first encountered the music of Benjamin Britten in the initial run of the composer’s first proper opera, Peter Grimes, at Sadler’s Wells in the summer of 1945. A musician by upbringing and psychoanalyst by education, Keller was astounded – apart from thinking it was to be a performance of Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte that night – at the dramatic depiction of a man, “a living conflict”, unwinding before […]
Opera North: David Fennessy: Pass The Spoon at Howard Assembly Room Until 21 December
Opera North’s own programme notes are carefully aimed at leaving its audience anticipating something altogether weird and wonderful, but it turns out to be a promise on which, sadly, Nicholas Bone’s production only half-delivers. Though not for want of trying … Bet Palmer‘s stage set whisks us over to a daytime television cookery programme, with […]
Ben Crick: The Last Machine Breaker on 10 and 11 November at Mind The Gap Bradford
Touring Wednesday 12 November Skipton Town Hall; Saturday 15 November The Warehouse, Holbeck, Leeds and Sunday 16 November Marsden Mechanics, Huddersfield. Ben Crick’s new chamber opera draws parallels between the Luddite resistance to mechanisation inthe textile industry in the early nineteenth century and our own attitude to the evident encroachment of AI into our daily […]
Opera North: George Frideric Handel’s Susannah, an Artistic Triumph
Susannah is at Leeds Grand Theatre until 22 October, then touring Newcastle, Salford Quays and Nottingham until 21 November. Tom Tollet reviews. As both operatic composer and impresario in early eighteenth-century London, Handel faced anannual economic purgatory brought about by the decreed closure of places offering “frivolous”entertainment during Lent and Eastertide, which left his orchestra, […]
In Conversation With Khanh Nhi Luong
Remember the “piano trails” around Leeds and Bradford last September? A plethora of upright keyboards seemed to adorn every street corner, inviting those passing to sit down and play. It was all designed to advertise the coming to town of the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition. Alongside the Tchaikovsky in Moscow, Chopin in Warsaw and […]
