News
Bampton Classical Opera Young Singers’ Competition 2017
The previous winners were mezzo-soprano Anna Starushkevych (2013) and soprano Galina Averina (2015). Bampton Classical Opera has a reputation for its commitment to young talent and a number of singers who have appeared on the Bampton stage have gone on to work with...
13 opera myths, busted
"Opera singers come in all shapes, sizes and ages," says soprano Simone Osborne. "We wear jeans, drink coffee, take our dogs for walks, have normal families and lives (outside the theatre), just like everyone else. You have probably shared a subway or streetcar ride...
Peter Kellner announced as winner of 2018 Wigmore Hall/Independent Opera Voice Fellowship
The following evening, on Friday 6 October, IO presented its inaugural Voice Scholars’ recital, its response to the needs of the artists it has supported since 2005. Recognising the importance of professional experience as well as training, IO’s five 2016-17 Voice...
Back to Baroque and to the battle lines with English Touring Opera
Romeo and Juliet, Rinaldo and Armida, Ramadès and Aida: love thwarted by warring countries and families is a perennial trope of literature, myth and history. Indeed, ‘Love and war are all one,’ declared Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote, a sentiment which seems to be...
A murdered composer, a lost libretto…could this be Canada’s greatest opera?
Against the Grain Theatre is making the case that Claude Vivier's 'Kopernikus' is a masterwork. Against the Grain Theatre is an innovative and nontraditional opera company. The company sings in pubs, invades mansions and does radical things with music, staging and...
Noa Wildschut, Mozart: Violin Concerto, Sonata (Warner)
Noa Wildschut, Mozart Yoram Ish-Hurwitz, Gordan Nikolić, Netherlands Chamber Orchestra Warner I’m about to break an iron rule and review a kid playing the violin. And, no, I haven’t given in to peer pressure, though there has been plenty of it from the London agency...
Opéra de Montréal’s Another Brick in the Wall heads to Cincinnati Opera
Cincinnati Opera’s U.S. premiere production of Another Brick in the Wall has begun presales of single tickets. These tickets are only available through October 31, and are limited to three dates in the five performance run. The opera opens July 20th at Springer...
The Life to Come: a new opera by Louis Mander and Stephen Fry
It began ‘with a purely obscene fancy of a Missionary in difficulties’. So E.M. Forster wrote to Siegfried Sassoon in August 1923, of his short story ‘The Life to Come’ - the title story of a collection that was not published until 1972, two years after Forster’s...
‘Never was such advertisement for a film!’: Thomas Kemp and the OAE present a film of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier at the Oxford Lieder Festival
The film was half the length of the opera but included some additional scenes such as a huge outdoor battle scene - the FeldMarschall, absent from the opera, is seen doing his patriotic duty on the battlefield when he learns of his wife’s dalliances at home - an...
New opera Missing tells the story of missing and murdered Indigenous women
The world premiere of Missing, a new opera based on the tragedy of over 1,200 missing and murdered First Nations, Inuit and Métis women and girls in Canada, is fast approaching. The opera, produced by City Opera Vancouver and Pacific Opera Victoria will open November...
Opera: Passion, Power and Politics review – a game-changing spectacular show
Victoria & Albert Museum, London Costumes by Dalí, singing by Callas – and a life-size baroque stage: this plunge into 400 years of opera is an exhilarating, mind-expanding experience This vast and exhilarating exhibition explores and celebrates opera’s often...
Against the Grain Theatre #GoForBaroque in 2017/2018 season
A Handel mash-up and an international co-production comprise AtG’s most expansive season to date TORONTO – Against the Grain Theatre (AtG) returns in its eighth season with BOUND, a pastiche workshop of new interpretations of Handel’s music, and a groundbreaking new...