Pablo del Moral News
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2024-04-24
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2024-03-06 12:30:00
Hercules, Komische Oper, 3 March 2024
Hercules – Brandon Cedel Dejanira – Paula Murrihy Iole – Penny Sofroniadou Hyllus – Caspar Singh Lichas – Susan Zarrabi Priest of Jupiter – Noam Heinz Choral soloists – Martin Fehr, Taiki MiyashitaDirector – Barrie KoskyDesigns – Katrin Lea TagDramaturgy – Zsolt Horpácsy, Johanna WallLighting – Joachim KleinAssistant director – Tobias RibitzkiChoral Soloists of the Komische Oper (director: David Cavelius) Orchestra of the Komische OperDavid Bates (conductor)Images: Monika RittershausDejanira (Paula Murrihy), Lichas (Susan Zarrabi) Handel’s ‘musical drama’ – an interesting term, though we can sometimes make too much of such things – Hercules has never proved especially popular. The composer’s public at the time and for a long while after tended to prefer his Biblical oratorios. Since the revival and, latterly, the craze for his Italian opere serie, they have ruled the roost. Semele, another ‘musical drama’, ‘after the manner of an oratorio’, has fared better since its modern stage […]
2024-02-23 12:43:00
Being performed for the first time for almost 20 years: Murray Hipkin & the North London Chorus give us a chance to finally experience Ethel Smyth's The Prison in concert
Whilst the last few decades have seen a remarkable increase in the amount of exploration of neglected 19th and 20th century British music, there has still been a tendency to view individual composers through quite a narrow lens. So, Stanford's most popular opera during his lifetime, Shamus O'Brien is only now getting its first studio recording, whilst Parry's oratorios, highly popular and influential in their day, have similarly only recently arrived properly on disc.Ethel Smyth is another one of those composers. Whilst The Wreckers has long been available on disc, it took Glyndebourne in 2021 to finally explore the composer's original version of the opera and her other operas have all had a patchy life and though finally we have all but one (the score of which has disappeared) available on disc. But what about the rest of Smyth's oeuvre? The early Mass certainly, but the rest of her work is only patchily […]
2024-02-16 07:46:00
Olawale Olayinka: Songs My Mother Taught Me
Olawale Olayinka is a young Nigerian classically trained violinist, currently based in London. If you have seen Brixton Chamber Orchestra or Chineke! then you may well have seen him. His performances with Chineke! include appearances last Summer performing Beethoven, Holst, Vaughan Williams' and Coleridge-Taylor, conducted by Kellen Gray, as well as with the orchestra at the 2023 Brit Awards at the O2 performing with Stormzy.Olayinka has just released a self-produced EP entitled Songs My Mother Taught Me, six tracks in which he plays traditional songs in modern versions with a mix of his solo violin and electronics. We begin with Oluronbi, just violin melody over ambient electronics, intriguing and engaging. The irregular phrase lengths in the music make it distinctive, whilst Olayinka's decision to not dress up the material pays dividends. The same approach applies to Labe igi orombo, with rather touching results and to the haunting Iwe Kiko. There […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-01-24 01:17:22
BMInt presents a not-so-short history of Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District in connection with the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first performances of the complete opera on January 25th and 27th. Tickets HERE On January 26, 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was presented in Moscow. This was not breaking news. Lady Macbeth had enjoyed almost simultaneous premieres in 1934, at the Maly Opera Theatre in Leningrad on January 22 and then at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre in Moscow two days later. The piece had elicited high praise from the February 1st edition of Soviet Art: Shostakovich’s new opera is indisputably one of the most significant achievements of our musical and theatrical life. It is in truth the first great, truly outstanding and masterfully constructed operatic work to have been composed in the 16 years since the October Revolution. Over the following two years, […]
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