Judith Toff News
Dutch opera singer
- Kingdom of the Netherlands
- opera singer
Last update
2024-04-23
Refresh
2015-09-29 13:23:09
Coliseum, London The mood has become brittle in this latest revival of Jonathan Miller’s take on Rossini’s comedy, but there is much to enjoy stillJonathan Miller’s production of The Barber of Seville has been an English National Opera mainstay for almost three decades and its clever stagecraft has outlasted the modish takes on the work that have come and gone elsewhere. However, both it and Rossini’s prequel to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro have been better served than on the first night of its latest revival, where it seems as if things needed to settle before its full impact can be felt.Restaged by Peter Relton, it has retained its commedia dell’arte-type humour, but has lost some of its underlying seriousness of intent. It plays down the unease that previously accompanied Rosina’s immurement in Bartolo’s world of medical equipment and specimen jars and the once premonitory ending, in which we realise that […]
2013-11-11 01:53:25
Lied et Scherzo (1910), Florent Schmitt’s Incredible Piece Featuring the French Horn
[…] cross-American tour of the Barrère Ensemble of Wind Instruments, a performing group organized by the Franco-American principal flautist of the New York Philharmonic, Georges Barrère . Among the cities where the work was performed were Detroit, Cincinnati, New York City – and even Charleston, West Virginia. Georges Barrere (1876-1944): The Franco-American flautist included Florent Schmitt’s “Lied et Scherzo” in the repertoire of the Barrere Ensemble’s cross-American tour in 1914. As recounted in Nancy Toff’s biography Georges Barrère, Monarch of the Flute , a reviewer at one of the concerts (at the Cooper Union) wrote this of the Schmitt piece: “Only a portion of the audience seemed to take a fancy to this latter ultra-modern music.” One could certainly quibble about whether the music was indeed “ultra-modern” in 1914 — and it certainly doesn’t seem that way today. Either way, I find the Lied et Scherzo to be one […]
2013-06-04 02:47:00
Great Führer of the sausage people
All you really need to get into The ROH Rossini La donna del lago is that a) it is wa a work of art based on a work of fiction that was consciously created to revise history and b) that Rossini was Italian. Why else is the guy writing Italainate bel canto trills if he's writing "about" the reality of Scotland ? What do composers know about opera! .All works of art are works of the imagination. Even history is a form of performance art because it can be reshaped through interpretation. And so to the Haggis, which appears in the John Fulljames staging. You don't need to know about the Celtic Society seen dining in the opera to get what the image means. All you need to know is what a haggis basically is, which isn't exactly rocket science. And if you don't know, you can find […]
2013-02-01 12:01:51
Film January is a bit of a theatrical black hole and with film releases timed to secure awards, it’s always a bumper film month! Once you get through the dull first third, the rest of The Hobbit is great. No-one can create fantasy worlds and magical creatures like Peter Jackson and these seemed even better than in The Lord of the Rings. It’s really only a tale of a journey, but the images and filming are so good I can forgive that; though whether I’ll still be saying that after Episodes II and III I’m not sure – he does appear to be spinning out a slight tale somewhat! The Life of Pi is a beautifully made film, and the best use of 3D I’ve seen, but it didn’t really engage me as much as I’d thought it would, largely because I couldn’t buy into the story. I’ve never read […]
or
- timeline: Lyrical singers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): T...