The London Philharmonic Orchestra has named the two early-career conductors who will serve as its Conducting Fellows for the 2025-26 season. The conductors are Nefeli Chadouli from Greece and Wilson Ng from Hong Kong. The program, which was established in 2023, allows conducting opportunities for those who are of backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the field, including minorities in terms of {…}
(Photo © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Tristram Kenton) There was much to fuel the excitement around a brand new production of Franz Lehár’s “The Merry Widow” for Glyndebourne Festival Opera this year. It’s the first time the work has ever been mounted there, and it’s always a treat to see what the slickly-oiled operatic operation, with its six weeks of {…}
(Photo: © Richard Hubert Smith/Glyndebourne Festival Opera 2024) The picnic hampers are packed, dinner jackets dry-cleaned, cufflinks wrangled, and drizzle forecast: the British country house opera season is back. It opens with a new production of Georges Bizet’s box-office stalwart “Carmen” from Glyndebourne Festival Opera, directed by Diane Paulus and conducted by Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati. This latest version, {…}
(Photo credit: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Richard Hubert Smith) John Cox and David Hockney’s production of “The Rake’s Progress” for Glyndebourne can surely lay claim to being the longest-running staging in the UK. It is 48-years-young this season, and on its 12th revival between Festival and Tour, not to mention the numerous loans of the production to international houses of {…}
Photo: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Tristram Kenton Normally, ‘heritage’ productions make me nervous. The established stagings summon to mind lumbering Zeffirelli-esque spectacles and unwieldy, moth-eaten costumes. Opera houses resting on their artistic laurels, unwilling take artistic risks. The ingrained conservatism in the opera business that could even prove fatal for the art form. But, Peter Hall’s production of Benjamin {…}
(Photo: Richard Hubert Smith) Whether you like Barrie Kosky’s stagings or not, they always have an enormous presence. Think of the Marlene Dietrich-inspired gorilla suit in his “Carmen” for the Royal Opera House, the inflatable Beckmesser caricature in the Nuremberg trial “Meistersinger”, or the eerie sea of ash and candles in his “Saul” for Glyndebourne. The latter, highly acclaimed, meant {…}
Photo credit: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. “La bohème”, as the archetypal verismo opera, tends to resist stagings that take it much beyond the confines of nineteenth-century Paris, and indeed non-naturalistic approaches to the work. (Audiences tend to resist them too.) The two most successful in London recently have been John Copley’s recently retired version at the Royal Opera House – {…}
The London Philharmonic Orchestra has unveiled its 2021-22 London season. For the purposes of this article, our focus will be on vocal and operatic works. The season kicked off with Tippett’s “The Midsummer Marriage” starring Robert Murray, Sophie Bevan, Ashley Riches, Jennifer France, Toby Spence. Edward Gardner conducted. Performance Date: Sept. 25, 2021 Next up is “In Bluebeard’s Castle.” The {…}
The London Philharmonic Orchestra has announced the two-year digital residency of the streaming service Marquee TV. Within its first year, the collaboration will bring 12 concerts, filmed live for later broadcasts, into homes worldwide. Ten of those performances will be from the LPO’s 2021-22 Royal Festival Hall season. Two initial concerts, captured earlier this year, will be available for free {…}
(Credit: © Glyndebourne Productions Ltd. Photo: Bill Cooper) Glyndebourne’s final production of this year’s festival is a semi-staged realization of Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” conceived by Daniel Dooner and featuring Glyndebourne music director Robin Ticciati in the pit, accompanied by their resident orchestra the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s a production that boldly sets out several role debuts, in Simon {…}
Rossini’s operatic world is a crossroads of things: the formal conventions of arias, duets, cavatina, patter number, the stock characters of the Commedia dell’arte, a hotchpotch of contemporary patriarchal and orientalist stereotypes, and reheated scenarios from various librettists. How do modern audiences, relatively unmoored from this world, connect with these shows? A Brilliant Production In this new production of “Il {…}