I have a very ambiguous relationship with Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia. Britten’s music I love and there’s a pretty dramatic story (albeit nonsense historically) trying to escape from Ronald Duncan’s weird Christo-prophetic and somewhat overripe libretto. Centaurs casting their seed among the stars? Anyone? So I was most interested to see what Anna Theodosakis would do with it in her production for UoT Opera currently playing at Harbourfront Centre.
The Orchestre Philharmonique de Monaco and their conductor Lawrence Foster recently recorded a collection of Britten works to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death. It’s a bit of an odd mix but it’s nicely done. The first piece is The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. This was composed for a commission by the British Ministry of Education to accompany an educational film for schools showcasing the various instruments of the orchestra. I find it hard to imagine that happening now. Anyway, it’s performed here, as it often is, without narration. It’s quite a sprightly and satisfying performance. Continue reading
The COC announcement of the 2026/27 season dropped this morning with zero fanfare; not even an embargoed presser in advamce. It’s pretty mixed and, rather to my surprise not far off what I predicted; at least in my more pessimistic version. So…
Amidst the Shades is a new album from British soprano Ruby Hughes accompanied by Jonas Nordberg on lute and archlute and Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann on viola da gamba. It’s a very beautiful record starting, as one might expect, with a selection of English song from the 16th and 17th century plus some pieces for solo lute. There are songs by John Dowland, including the well known Can She Excuse My Wrongs (possibly to a text by Robert Devereux; if so clear who “she” is). Robert Johnson makes an appearance with three songs including two Shakespeare settings. John Danyel also features along with instrumental music by Anthony Holborne and Tobias Hume. Continue reading
Continuing the theme of all Grimes, all the time… The only commercially available recording of Britten’s Peter Grimes with Stuart Skelton in the title role is a Chandos SACD recorded in Bergen in 2019 with Edward Gardner conducting and it’s really good. These two though had been captured on video in 2015 in a David Alden production at ENO. That had formed part of the ENO Live series of cinema transmissions but it was rebroadcast in August last year on Sky Arts in the UK. That version (at least my copy) is 720p video and AAC 2 channel 48kHz audio; so not quite Blu-ray standard but very tolerable.
Almost fourteen years ago I reviewed the DVD of the 1994 ENO production of Britten’s Peter Grimes. The DVD was so bad technically that it was quite hard to decide much about the merits of the performance although it was obvious that Philip Langridge’s Grimes was something special. On June 1st this year the BBC rebroadcast the recording in HD on BBC4. I have a copy of that broadcast and it’s way better than the North American DVD release and so I wanted to clarify and, where appropriate, correct what I said in that earlier review.
The last concert of the season in the COC’s free concert season took place in the RBA on Thursday. It was the farewell concert for Queen Hezumuryango and Wesley Harrison plus a second farewell for Brian Cho and Mattia Senesi.
I don’t pay as much attention to the free concert series at Metropolitan United as I should but yesterday I made it there to hear tenor Alexander Cappellazzo and pianist Narmina Afandiyeva in a programme of 20th and 21st century song.
The second performance of Opera 5’s production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw on Thursday night was sung by the “apprentice” cast drawn from Opera McGill. Curiously, it was an all female cast with women singing both Miles and Peter Quint.
It’s always been a bit of a mystery to me why Britten’s chamber operas are not done more often by smaller opera companies. They use a modest orchestra (13 players for The Turn of the Screw), have equally modest sized casts, no chorus and they are in English. They offer the chance to perform a work as written at much lower cost than grand opera and without the compromises inherent in downscaling works written on a larger scale.
operaramblings 