Grand Theatre News
theatre in Leeds, England
- Leeds
- United Kingdom
Last update
2024-03-24
Refresh
2024-02-18 15:34:10
Grand Theatre, LeedsSetting Mascagni’s one-act opera amid the unease of 70s communist Poland, and moving Rachmaninoff’s to a colourful 90s surfing commune, the company does them both delectable justiceOpera North’s Cavalleria Rusticana was designed to be detachable: it premiered as part of the company’s 2017 Little Greats season, appearing alongside a variety of fellow one-act operas rather than just the customary Pagliacci. For this season’s outing, however, director Karolina Sofulak has coupled it only with Rachmaninoff’s Aleko, in which another insular society (this time a bohemian commune) is fractured by a love triangle turned fatal. Sofulak goes further still, explicitly linking the two operas by conceiving Aleko and Cavalleria’s Alfio as the same man, 20 years apart, and haunted – in every sense – by a crime he is doomed to repeat.Both stagings shift the action of their operas significantly: Cavalleria Rusticana trades sun-kissed Sicily for 1970s communist Poland, and […]
2024-01-30 09:23:00
The one and the other: NI Opera in new production of The Juniper Tree written jointly by Philip Glass and Robert Moran
In 1985, Philip Glass collaborated with fellow composer Robert Moran on The Juniper Tree, a chamber opera based on a tale by Brothers Grimm. The two composers collaborated almost equally, alternating scenes and sharing the responsibility for writing the transitions. The result is an intriguing hybrid, which comes after Glass' great trilogy of early operas (Einstein on the Beach, Satygraha, and Akhnaten) yet before better known chamber operas Northern Ireland Opera (NI Opera) is presenting a new production of the opera, directed by Cameron Menzies (NI Opera's artistic director) and conducted by Frasier Hickland in the Grand Theatre, Belfast's Studio Theatre from 21 to 24 February 2024, with a cast drawn from emerging singers who have been working on NI Opera's artist development programme including James Cooper, Mary McCabe, Rachael Heater, Jenny Bourke, Petra Wells, Desmond Havlin, Ryan Gamham, Paul McQuillan and Niamh Lavery. Further details from NI Opera's website.Also as […]
2024-01-13 17:21:00
Eavesdropping on their dramas: Opera North's 'in the round' production Britten's Albert Herring
Britten: Albert Herring - Claire Pascoe, Dafydd Jones - Opera North (Photo: Tom Arber) Britten: Albert Herring; Judith Howarth, Heather Shipp, Amy Freston, William Dazeley, Paul Nilon, Richard Mosley-Evans, Dominic Sedgwick, Dafydd Jones, Katie Bray, Claire Pascoe, Rosa Sparks Willow Bell, Oliver Mason, director: Giles Havergal/Elaine Tyler-Hall, conductor: Garry Walker; Opera North at the Howard Assembly RoomA wonderfully involving revival of Giles Havergal's intimate, in the round production of Britten's comedy brings out the work's humanityBritten's Albert Herring was written as a relatively portable chamber opera for the English Opera Group. Famously premiered at Glyndebourne in 1947, when John Christie evidently told people he didn't like it, the work has generally been performed in medium to large size theatres. When Giles Havergal directed the work for Opera North in 2013, it was performed not in the Grand Theatre, Leeds, but in the smaller Howard Assembly Room.The production returned to the Howard […]
2023-10-27 13:19:34
Grand Theatre, LeedsSet in the 1920s, James Hurley’s staging – the third of the company’s Green Season – is blessed with perfectly mismatched lovers. Under conductor Kerem Hasan the score sighs and swoonsPuccini’s La Rondine (the swallow) is, true to its title, a curious bird: not quite operetta and not quite grand opera, with few of the instantly excerptable set pieces of his more famous creations. The plot is a hybrid too: a cousin to La Traviata but minus its redemptive third act, and with a servant subplot redolent of Die Fledermaus.Veering between comedy and tragedy, it culminates in one of the composer’s uneasiest endings, when the courtesan Magda is denied not just a happy ending but also the more familiar Puccinian option of a cathartic death. Determined that her own past will bring ruin to her unworldly lover Ruggero, she leaves him bereft – returning miserably to the gilded […]
or
- map: Opera houses - Europe
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): G...