The current offering from Operavision on Youtube is the 2020 production by Opera North of Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins livestreamed from Leeds Playhouse in November 2020. It was Pay to View then but now it’s available for free until October.
There are a couple of new streams coming up today. At 3pm EST Opera North is releasing a recording of Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti from a couple of years ago. The main local attraction is that Dinah is played by Wallis Giunta. That one is on Youtube. At 5pm husband and wife Alexander and Jimin Dobson are performing in the NAC’s Canada Performs series. This link should get you there.
There were a couple of fun things posted yesterday too. Ian Cusson performed in the NAC series playing 10 of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues. It’s still up on Facebook. Also the Kingston Symphony produced a very clever video of the finale of Beethoven’s Eroica with each musician performing their part at home and Evan Mitchell editing to create a complete video. It’s very clever and it’s up on Youtube.
I’ve been impressed by Jonathan Dove’s art songs so I was glad to be able to take a look at one of his operas. It’s The Adventures of Pinocchio and it was recorded in a production by Opera North at Sadlers Wells in 2008. I feel a bit ambivalent about it. I really like the music but I’m not hugely engaged by the libretto. I think this is largely because of the subject matter so it may come off better for someone else.
Phyllida Lloyd’s 2000 BBC film of Britten’s Gloriana, based on her production for Opera North, is quite fascinating. The bonus interviews reveal the utter disdain for films/videos of stage opera productions held by pretty much everyone involved in the project. It’s an interesting perspective to hear in a world where Cinema and streaming HD broadcasts are increasingly common and where Blu-ray/DVD has clearly overtaken CD as the preferred medium for opera recordings. In some ways, of course, it’s because the technology has improved enormously. DVD was still relatively new in 2000 and widescreen, flat screen TVs were yet to come. In any event, this attitude led to the creation of a rather interesting film.
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