LEOŠ JANÁČEK: THE CUNNING LITTLE VIXEN
On these shores and considerably further afield, Opera North is held in peerless regard for its Janáček productions. This vintage staging of The Cunning Little Vixen, revived here from its last appearance in 1984, formed the root of a now burgeoning reputation. Maria Björnson‘s exquisite, almost fairyland animal costumes, her beautifully-apt, undulating countryside set, David […]
Giacomo Puccini: Tosca – Reviewed
Just about every opera entwines two people fatefully pierced by Cupid’s arrow and, if the storyline went no further than that, what wondrously glorious music would we forever associate with the genre, yet how woefully brief would each production be … the classical music equivalent of a three-minute single. Opera keeps our interest for an […]
Christoph Wilibad Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice – Opera North at Leeds Grand Theatre
Just when one might have thought it safe for Hades to return to business as usual, here comes another operatic Orpheus wandering its depths in search of his missing wife. Unlike Opera North’s previous venture, the fascinating and rather wonderful collaboration with South Asian Arts, where the exoticisms of Monteverdi and Indian classical music blossomed […]
Opera North – Monteverdi’s Orpheus Reviewed (at Leeds Grand Theatre This Week)
A scholastic consensus identifies the first exotic entertainment combining song, dance and instruments that, today, we might classify as Opera, to the Florence of the Medicis in 1598. From whatever tentative, embryonic beginnings, the musical world had not long to wait, therefore, for the genre’s first assured masterpiece in Monteverdi’s setting of the Orpheus legend […]
Leeds Haydn Players at West Park United Reformed Church
Leeds’ vibrant amateur orchestral scene starts its Autumn Season each year at the beginning of September, at the end of the long school holiday. Weekly rehearsals normally result in a Christmastide concert, so it’s particularly enterprising of Leeds Haydn Players to bring off a concert by the second week in October. As the ensemble’s name […]
