Previously published here and elsewhere As Teodora Gheorghiu prepares to sing in Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne, she tells Rupert Christiansen how she overcame an illness that threatened her career. It may only be something they put in the water, but over the last century or so Romania has produced an extraordinary succession of velvety lyric […]
Opera
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Rupert Christiansen writes: What role opera should play in our educational system is a problem that has baffled and exercised me for my 25 years as a critic – and lover – of this great if beleaguered art form. My feelings are complicated by the fact that my own path to opera was entirely self-motivated. […]
First published 2012 The strings play in helicopters, the trumpeter’s on a trapeze, and a camel dances around while defecating planets. Alexis Petridis on Birmingham Opera Company’s bid to stage a mind-boggling Stockhausen opera. MORE
Answers HERE
Originally published in January 2012 Until last year Sameer Rahim had little interest in classical music – but now he is hooked on opera. In a new column he offers a novice-eye’s view of this seemingly forbidding but truly magical art form. Continues HERE
Andrew Clements writes: Though Aeschylus’s triptych of tragedies has influenced opera composers from Wagner to Birtwistle, relatively few of them have been tempted to fashion a stage work of their own from the Oresteia plays. There is Sergei Taneyev’s ambitious, evening-long version, while Iannis Xenakis’s Oresteia compresses the whole drama into just 50 minutes, with […]
http://www.silentopera.co.uk/index.html
As more opera houses broadcast their productions in the cinema is this the end of live singing, asks Rupert Christiansen Continue HERE
Martin Kettle writes: Unlike Angela Merkel, our leaders rarely flaunt their cultural tastes. It’s to the detriment of national life Last Saturday I sat in something very close to rapture just a few feet away from Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel. But Merkel wasn’t making a speech. She wasn’t giving a press conference. And, although I […]
Originally published January 2012 I grew up in a household where not a note of classical music was played. I must have heard some at school, but all I remember of music classes was mucking around on a synthesiser playing the Batman theme tune. As a teenager watching telly, I recall humming along to The […]
One of Benjamin Britten’s most famous operas was censored and branded “obscene” before it reached the stage, a new biography of the composer will reveal. MORE
First published 2012 Having written her first sonata at the age of five, Alma Deutscher is, unavoidably, being likened to Mozart. Simon Usborne joins the audience MORE
https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/apr/18/a-z-wagner-gesamtkunstwerk
EVANSTON, Ill. — In an acclaimed book that has been called a “welcome intervention” in gender studies and music, a Northwestern University musicologist explores how Catherine the Great and three other female monarchs who ruled Russia for most of the 18th century used opera to champion their political power. Written by Bienen School of Music […]
From the archives: In today’s economic climate, opera houses are in trouble. Yet at the same time, more people are watching opera than ever before. What’s going on, asks Rupert Christiansen. It seemed all too grimly appropriate last week that Opera Europa – the umbrella support group and talking-shop for European opera houses – […]