Khedivial Opera House News
former opera house in Cairo, Egypt
- Cairo Governorate
- Egypt
Last update
2024-03-29
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2021-12-23 14:29:28
Premiered in Cairo 150 years ago, set in an exoticised ancient Egypt and written by a man who refused to visit the country for fear of ‘being mummified’, the beloved opera has left a complex legacy in the country its drama is set In the middle of downtown Cairo is an anonymous-looking concrete building that stretches along one side of a huge landscaped roundabout. If you peer upwards, you’ll see it labelled, between rows of air-con units, in Arabic and English: “Opera office building and garage.” As monuments to past cultural glories go, it’s not a thing of beauty. But this block marks the site of the Khedivial Opera House – a venue erected in 1869 – and which, on 24 December 1871, staged the first performance of a new opera by the world’s then most famous composer: Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida. Today, Aida is one of the most regularly […]
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ArtsJournal: music
2018-04-25 20:01:24
Are The Middle East's Grand New Cultural Buildings European Imperialism?
Can the arrival of Western culture in the Middle East be equated simply with European imperialism? Is this how the European bourgeoisie, as Marx would say, ‘creates the world after its own image’? First, let us consider the question of power. The Khedivial Opera House and other new Western-style cultural spaces represented authority to ordinary […]
2015-09-25 11:03:15
Listen in its entirety to Warner Classics’ new studio recording of Aida with Antonio Pappano conducting the Orchestra of Santa Cecilia, and Jonas Kaufmann and Anja Harteros in the principal rolesStudio recordings of large-scale operas are something of a rarity these days, and this new recording, with Antonio Pappano conducting and Jonas Kaufmann and Anja Harteros among the singers, feels like a very special event. The recording of Verdi’s grand opera, first performed in 1871 at Cairo’s Khedivial Opera House, took place earlier this year in Rome’s 2800-seat concert hall the Sala Santa Cecilia with the orchestra and chorus of the Orchestra of Santa Cecilia. Continue reading...
2014-12-19 02:22:12
This is the week that was
For many people, the week running up to Christmas Day is a frenzy of last-minute shopping, gift wrapping and chestnut peeling, not forgetting rehearsals for Carol Services and Midnight Masses. This week’s blog post, however, skirts the tinsel and mistletoe to look back at some of the more sober events that took place in this particular week during Christmas Past. On 19 December, 1843 Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was published. No doubt author and publisher alike had little inkling of the enduring success it would go on to enjoy, nor the alternative media into which it would be refashioned. Among the more recent of these is Bryan Kelly’s 20-minute distillation of the tale for narrator and orchestra, Scrooge (8.572744 ). So, put down that chestnut peeler and listen here to Simon Callow setting the opening scene from the work . Darius Milhaud’s Symphony No. 2 (9.80590 […]
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