Antonio Orsini News
naturalist from Italy
- Kingdom of Italy
- naturalist
Last update
2024-03-28
Refresh
2021-10-03 09:26:00
A day at the Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary
[…] incredible momentum, though the music gradually unwinds and the haunted feeling returned with an almost-waltz, where the rhythm never quite settled. Stephen Johnson's Angel's Arc for clarinet and string quartet was written as a tribute to an area of the Pennine moors which he explored during his teenage years, though there are also music quotations which reference people who were important to him at that period. The Carducci Quartet were joined by clarinettist, Matthew Hunt (from the Orsini Ensemble). The worked opened with lovely rhapsodic moments for the clarinet over quietly sustained strings. There were moments of dialogue, but the clarinet was very much to the fore and I kept thinking of Finzi's writing for clarinet. The middle section was a sort of furiously intense scherzo, with fast movements between different emotions yet still with time for the clarinet to meander, despite some furious string playing. The world of the opening section […]
2020-08-24 07:14:36
Is the opera world ready for a Lesbian Cherubino - how opera remains rather tame when it comes to exploring some areas of gender and sexual relations
[…] English National Opera featured a female Sesto and so on. Quite often these changes are to children, servants, or sidekicks such as Micah in Handel's Samson and even when we come to Sesto there is no love interest. And there is the nub, productions rarely explore what it might do to an opera's dramaturgy, how the relationships might be put into a different context if the hero simply becomes the heroine. So we might play Orsini as a woman in Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia (as happened at the ENO production), but Orsini has little love interest, and it would be far less likely to have female hero in other bel canto trousers roles such as Aurelio in Donizetti's L'Assedio di Calais or Arsace in Rossini's Semiramide. Verdi: Un ballo in maschera - Matteo Lippi (the Duke), Alison Langer (Oscar) - Opera Holland Park 2019 (Photo Ali Wright) […]
2020-02-29 06:21:00
Classical Music News of the Week, February 29, 2020
[…] of the 43-year old Alessandro Stradella cut short the turbulent life of one of the greatest composers of his generation. Most probably ordered by a jealous husband or paramour of one of his lovers, his life ended as lurid as it was prolific, leaving a legacy illuminated by genius and saturated by scandal. In 1673 Stradella writes an oratorio called Ester Liberatrice del Popolo Ebreo (Esther, Liberator of the Jewish People). The libretto by Leilo Orsini sets the one story from the Old Testament (or simply the Bible, as it is referred to by Jews) in which God is never mentioned. It is a story in which banquets, sexual revelry, court intrigue, gossip, plots and strategy wind their way to the triumph of a clever Jewish queen over a murderous court minister. The Book of Esther is also the first mention of genocide in the Bible and in Jewish history. […]
2019-08-19 20:44:00
Bertold Goldschmidt - Beatrice Cenci, DVD Bregenz
[…] stage at Bregenz is filmed, darkness lit by sudden flashes of light - hiding yet alluding to the unspeakable. Lucrezia finds Beatrice, who has gone mad, cradling a doll. "I have endured a wrong so great that neither life nor death can give me rest - ask not what it is". The voices of stepdaughter and stepmother intertwine, suggesting other unspoken horrors (Lucrezia's quite young - the many adult kids are not hers. Beatrice talks Orsini into hiring hit men, though he doesn't know what for and who will be hurt. Count Cenci returns, but Lucrezia bars his way. He threatens to hurt Beatrice yet again. On the Bregenz stage, Cenci wears a diamante penis, big enough that the audience far from the stage get an eyeful. Quietly, Lucrezia slips something into his wine, and he falls asleep. The hitmen come but their job is done, and they throw the […]