(Photo: Padraig Grant) As well as its featured operas, the Wexford Opera Festival also puts on an array of other events, including performances of its “pocket operas,” that is, short works or abridged versions of larger works, sung to a piano accompaniment, presented in the smaller Jerome Hynes Theatre, rather than on the theatre’s main stage. One of the “pocket {…}
(Photo: Chris Tribble) In June of this year, OperaWire was fortunate enough to report and review the sterling efforts being made by the regional opera company New Sussex Opera in bringing the wonderful world of opera to the masses, performing glorious art away from the mainstream houses with their performance of a rarely sung opera, Saint-Saëns’s “The Silver Bell.” This time, {…}
(Photo:Genevieve Girling) There really does need to be a connection between the operas chosen by a company if it decides to stage a double bill. Two randomly chosen pieces with little to tie the works together, or worse, drawing attention to certain common superficialities and presenting them as an artistically founded pairing, is not simply lazy programming but is also {…}