Richard Edgar-Wilson News
British opera singer
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- opera singer, musician
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2024-03-28
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2021-02-04 09:37:53
Margaret Catchpole: Two Worlds Apart - Stephen Dodgson's final opera on disc at last and revealed as a work full of character and richly emotive music
Stephen Dodgson Margaret Catchpole: Two Worlds Apart; Kate Howden, William Wallace, Nicholas Morris, Alistair Ollerenshaw, Perpetuo, Julian Perkins; NAXOS Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 4 February 2021 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★) Stephen Dodgson's Suffolk opera is finally on disc in a performance which does the work full justiceStephen Dodgson's final opera Margaret Catchpole was premiered in 1979 and performed again, in a revised version, some ten years later but since then seems to have languished. Thanks to the Stephen Dodgson Trust, the work was performed and recorded at Snape Maltings in July 2019 and the recording is now issued on disc. Stephen Dodgson's Margaret Catchpole: Two Worlds Apart is on Naxos. Julian Perkins conducts the ensemble Perpetuo with Kate Howden, William Wallace, Nicholas Morris, Alistair Ollerenshaw, Richard Edgar-Wilson, Diana Moore, Peter Willcock, Matthew Brook, Julia Sporsen, Robyn Allegra Parton, Michael Bundy, Leonora Dawson-Bowling, Jonathan Hanley, and Mark […]
2021-01-30 09:54:37
Reviving early English opera, staging Baroque opera: I chat to conductor Julian Perkins about his recording of John Eccles' Semele and staging Handel's Tamerlano
John Eccles: Semele - Julian Perkins, Academy of Ancient Music - Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge, November 2019 John Eccles' opera Semele with its libretto by William Congreve is a work that I have long known about and been fascinated by. Written in the early 18th century, just before Handel arrived in London, it is probably the best English opera after Purcell's Dido and Aeneas yet it has virtually disappeared from view. It was, therefore, welcome news that the Academy of Ancient Music (AAM) was collaborating with the Cambridge Handel Opera Company (CHOC) to perform and record the work with a strong cast, directed by Julian Perkins [see my review of Semele]. Julian is the artistic director of CHOC and founder of the group Sounds Baroque, so I was delighted to be able to chat to him about Semele, English opera, staging Baroque opera and much else besides. […]
2019-07-04 11:43:12
A Suffolk heroine returns home: Margaret Catchpole: Two Worlds Apart
Margaret Catchpole was a young Suffolk woman who was convicted of stealing a horse in a desperate attempt to meet a young man (a smuggler) with whom she had fallen in love, she was caught, convicted and transported to Australia, where she remained and her letters are an important eyewitness account of events in Australia in the early 19th century.In 1979 the composer Stephen Dodgson turned to the story of Margaret Catchpole as the basis for his chamber opera with a libretto by the Suffolk-based writer Ronald Fletcher. Dodgson's wife, Jane Clark Dodgson, lived in Suffolk and fell in love with the novel The History of Margaret Catchpole by Richard Cobbold (first published in London in 1845), and this formed the inspiration for Dodgson's choosing the story for the opera.Margaret Catchpole premiered in 1979, having a short run in Hadleigh, Suffolk. Dodgson subsequently revised the last Act and this version […]
2017-11-12 07:15:48
Ciara Hendrick, Philippa Hyde, Richard Edgar-Wilson, the Harmonious Society of Tickle-Fiddle Gentleman/ Rawson (Ramée)Colley Cibber, the waspish actor-manager at Drury Lane, had a hearty dislike of vogueish Italian opera, and in 1715 set out with his music director, Johann Christoph Pepusch, to “give the town a little good music in a language they understand”. Between them they devised an elaborate masque, Venus and Adonis, recreated here by Robert Rawson with some fine soloists and the fleet-footed
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