Charles Neate News
Last update
2024-03-26
Refresh
2022-07-17 14:42:47
Baroque gem: Hasse's early serenata gets an intriguing modern staging in Buxton with some stylish singing.
Hasse: Antonio e Cleopatra - Ellie Neate, Thalie Knights - Buxton International Festival (Photo David John King Photography)Johann Hasse: Antonio e Cleopatra: Ellie Neate, Thalie Knights, director: Evangeline Cullingworth, musical director: Satoko Doi Luck, Buxton Festival Baroque Orchestra; Buxton International Festival at the Pavilion Arts CentreReviewed 16 July 2022 (★★★★)A rare outing for Hasse's early serenata in a stylish performance that brings the work right up to dateLike Handel before him, Johann Hasse (some 14 years Handel's junior) left his native Germany to get some Italianate polish. His first major work was the serenata Antonio e Cleopatra, which premiered at the estate of a Royal councillor near Naples in 1725. A serenata requiring just two singers with strings and harpsichord, it was a small-scale piece for an aristocratic entertainment much like Handel's cantata Aci, Galatea e Polifemo, written for an aristocratic wedding in Naples in 1708. It was an imaginative idea […]
2022-07-15 15:45:00
Reviews of Buxton International Festival operas 2022
[…] in some dead-end theatre, as finally they dress up in full Carry On Cleo mode for the suicide pact that ends the piece? The props, of course, give them something to do as they emote their way through Hasse’s arias (plus a couple of duets, one to close each act), with all those repeats. The vocal music is extremely taxing, though, and the quality of the two singers – Thalie Knights, as Antonio, and Ellie Neate, as Cleopatra – is what the audience has come to hear. They are top-class young artists, well able to embellish their repeats tastefully, and in Ellie Neate’s case making the most of her frequent bursts of high-powered top notes (originally written for Farinelli). The first-act closing duet, “Un solo sospiro”, verges on the Handelian in its variety of emotive resource and showed the two both at their best. Musical direction from the harpsichord is […]
2022-03-04 09:47:24
Urban dystopia: Guildhall School's double bill of Judith Weir's Miss Fortune and Menotti's The Telephone
[…] a more intimate stage. Now, in what seems to be the work's first revival since 2012, Guildhall School of Music and Drama is presenting Judith Weir's Miss Fortune at their Silk Street Theatre in a production directed by Martin Lloyd-Evans, with designs by Anna Reid, and conducted by Dominic Wheeler, in a double bill with Menotti's The Telephone. Both works were double cast and we caught the performance on Wednesday 2 March 2022 with Ellie Neate and Jack Holton in The Telephone, and Jacob Harrison, Laura Fleur, Cleo Lee McGowan, Kieron-Connor Valentine, Innocent Masuku, Amy Holyland, and Jonathan Eyers in Miss Fortune Miss Fortune is based on a Sicilian folk tale, and Weir's own libretto abstracts the story and creates a sort of moral fable that rather reminded me of Georg Kaiser's From Morning to Midnight and David Sawer's brave attempt to turn it into an opera in 2001 at English […]
2022-02-21 09:17:29
This year's Buxton International Festival runs from 7 to 24 July 2022, and artistic director Adrian Kelly's programme features five operas and a musical including three new productions, along with a wide array of concerts and other events. The festival's new productions are Rossini's La donna del lago and Hasse's Antonio e Cleopatra, and the musical Gypsy, and there is also the premiere of a new oratorio. Rossini's La donna del lago, based on Sir Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake, is directed by Jacopo Spirei and conducted by Adrian Kelly with Máire Flavin as Elena, Nico Darmanin as Uberto, John Irvin as Rodrigo and Catherine Carby as Malcolm. Evangeline Cullingworth directs Hasse's Antonio e Cleopatra the Pavilion Arts Centre with Buxton Baroque Ensemble, music director Satoko Doi-Luck, with Ellie Neate and Thalie Knights in the title roles. The final festival production is Jules Styne's Gypsy, directed by […]
or
- timeline: Composers (Europe). Performers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): N...