In Conversation………with Matthew Oglesby and Dr Simon Lindley

Charles Eager met up with Matthew Oglesby, composer of Penthos for St Peter’s Singers, to discuss the work with him.  They were joined by Dr Simon Lindley, the choir’s director. Matthew   Penthos is a work for choir, orchestra and soloists and is about how we grieve and how we cope with loss and how we […]

Dr Simon Lindley on Leeds St Peter’s Singers, With Commentary by Quentin Brown

Dr Simon Lindley talks about the history of Leeds based St. Peter’s Singers, as well as the culture of sacred and secular music over the past forty years, and the choir’s current and recent projects recording and performing.  The Origin and Founding of the Choir The Choir was founded in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee year […]

Review: Leeds Lit Fest: Adverse Camber’s The Shahnameh

Of the events I attended during the first Leeds Literature Festival, this humble, forty-five minute family show was, somewhat surprisingly, the highlight, and its richness deserves an article on its own. As regular readers of my reviews will know is certainly not my custom, I actually arrived early to this show.  The extremely bare stage […]

Leeds Lit Fest: Review – A Trio of Events

Charles Eager reviews 34 Years of Peepal Tree Press, Anna Beer: Patriot or Traitor – The Life and Death of Sir Walter Raleigh, and Nunkie Theatre: A Pleasing Terror- Two Stories by M R James. I have always been somewhat sceptical of Literature Festivals, given my conviction that almost all literary figures worth seeing are […]

The Rite of Spring and Gianni Schicchi Reviewed

‘The Rite of Spring’ (Stravinsky, Phoenix Dance Theatre) and ‘Gianni Schicchi’ (Puccini, Opera North) at Leeds Grand Theatre, Saturday 16 Feb 2019 The combination of Stravinsky’s pagan religious ceremonies with Puccini’s comically undevout Christians makes for an evening which, whilst slightly jarring, is by turns harrowing and hilarious. The Rite of Spring (1913) Thanks to […]