Charles John Frederick Lampe News
English composer and organist
- organ
- Kingdom of Great Britain
- composer, organist
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2024-04-25
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2024-02-05 09:17:00
Low comedy & sophisticated satire: New Sussex Opera revives John Frederick Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley
We often forget that 18th century audiences enjoyed a good laugh as much as their modern day counterparts, live wasn't just opera seria and uplifting oratorio. One of the comic masterpieces of the period, John Frederick Lampe's delightfully satirical opera, The Dragon of Wantley, has remained puzzlingly neglected, with performances only happening once in a while. Perhaps the fact that there is no definitive score does not help. Written in the 1730s by a musician who played the bassoon in Handel's orchestra, it proved popular and almost certainly performers of the time took a creative view of it. This is reflected in the two surviving scores, one without recitatives and the other heavily cut (presumably a shorter touring version). However, in 2022, Resonus Classics issued a terrific new recording of the opera [see my review].The good news is that New Sussex Opera is presenting a new production of The Dragon of Wantley which […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2023-12-19 16:22:40
Locke’s List for 2023: Notable Operatic Recordings Plus
). I’m happy, once again, to be presenting here at the Boston Musical Intelligencer my personal selection of some of the most notable and engaging of the lot. Baroque era: I was delighted to get to know John Frederick Lampe’s The Dragon of Wantley (1737), in a highly accomplished and spirited recording. The work feels a bit like a successor to The Beggar’s Opera, not least in its pointed satire of social norms. (The work was just performed by the Boston Early Music Festival, though with a different cast and orchestra; the Boston Globe called the result “spellbinding.” Virtual tickets to watch the videorecording are available through December 23, 2023.) A recording of a serious English opera of the period, Matthew Locke’s Psyche, was musically marvelous but utterly undone for me by the mispronunciations of the libretto by the all-Francophone cast. No such problems occurred with Jean-Marie Leclair’s Scylla et Glaucus, […]
2022-07-23 11:00:36
Vladimir Jurowski and the Bayerisches Staatsorchester excel in an ideal double bill. And top soloists and the Brook Street Band have fun with 18th-century Yorkshire-set farce• The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, beloved of British audiences for his long stints with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Glyndebourne, became music director of the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, in 2021. Suppressing any envy, we can enjoy the fruits of their collaboration in
2022-07-21 06:27:00
The Dragon of Wantley: a fine Handelian cast have terrific fun with Lampe's parody of opera seria
John Frederick Lampe: The Dragon of Wantley - Mary Bevan, Catherine Carby, Mark Wilde, John Savournin, The Brook Street Band, John Andrews; RESONUS CLASSICS20 July 2022 (★★★★½)Lampe's delightfully satirical opera combines a crazy English plot with fine Italianate music, performed here with great style to superb effect.Following the success of The Beggars Opera in the early 1730s, there was a renewed interest in the idea of English opera. Few significant works came out of this, but one that had a major success was somewhat in the same vein as The Beggars Opera. John Frederick Lampe's The Dragon of Wantley takes a satirical view of opera by combining a tale that is pure earth English fun and setting it to fine music. This combination of wit and pastiche worked well, and the work was popular. Though since the early 19th century it has rather languished and is certainly not as well known as it […]
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