Opera North The Big Opera Mystery at Leeds Grand Theatre Until 22 November
The proceedings were opened by Despina, alone on the stage of the Grand Theatre in Leeds. In a set rigged out as a police station, she addressed a mass of young children gathered in the stalls on a Saturday afternoon with their adults, telling them that her name was Despina, and that she was in […]
Leeds Festival Chorus at St Edmund’s Church in Roundhay on 22 November
Leonard Bernstein stirred strong passions in concert halls and in his life generally. You will know this if you watched Maestro, the biographical film about him on Netflix a couple of years ago. The actor playing the great composer-conductor (Bradley Cooper) threw himself around energetically to give us a good idea of what an American […]
La Bohème – Another Dynamic Revival From Opera North 18 October
La Bohème is usually a sure-fire bet for theatre companies around the world, a supremely popular opera with everlasting themes of young love, loss and grief driven by Giacomo Puccini’s extraordinary music. The plot was picked out of a sprawling mass of stories assembled by the novelist Henri Murger in the mid-nineteenth century. It generally […]
Opera North’s Simon Boccanegra: at St George’s Hall Bradford 24 – 26 April 2025
It’s the early fourteenth century. In a council chamber divided between the Plebeians and the Patricians, two noisy factions in the Italian port of Genoa, Simon Boccanegra, the Doge (Duke) is presiding. There’s enough bother in his city already, so he urges those present to vote for peace with the rival port of Venice. He […]
Book of the Bard: Exploring Shakespeare’s First Folio
Distinguished Shakespeare scholar Professor Emma Smith is coming to Leeds to talk about the very first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays – probably the most influential secular book ever printed. Without it, half of the Bard’s plays would have been lost. The event has been organised by Headingley LitFest, which has marked it as a […]
