Dominic Sedgwick News
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2024-04-26
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2024-04-05 08:55:00
West Green House Opera: new artistic director Tom Elwin introduces the 2024 season
[…] the cast will include past and present participants in the West Green House Opera Young Artist Programme. This years Young Artists will also be presenting their own lunchtime concert as part of the festival.The final staging of the season is Rossini's Il barbiere di Sivigla, directed by Victoria Newlyn and conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren (who directed and conducted Rossini's La Cenerentola in 2019 and Donizetti's L’elisir d’amore in 2022 at West Green). The strong cast includes Dominic Sedgwick as Figaro, Nico Darmanin as Almaviva and Katie Bray as Rosina.Tom had sung at West Green and the company had supported him, but it was still a surprise when they approached him about taking over as artistic director [the company has something of a tradition of using singers in artistic roles, Yvonne Kenny was artistic advisor to the company in the early days and Kirsty Hopkins, from The Sixteen, was the previous artistic director]. Tom […]
2024-02-02 10:19:00
As chilling and emotional as ever: Kate Lindsey returns as Offred in ENO's strong revival of Poul Ruders' The Handmaid's Tale
[…] Offred's husband. A big mention here to the poignant, and incredibly poised, performance from Elspeth McDonald as Luke and Offred's daughter (doubling with Francesca Ditchburn). More 'blink and you miss them' roles, important in the ensemble but without much time in the spotlight, were Annabella-Vesela Ellis as New Offglen, Alan Oke as the Doctor, Helen Johnson as Moira's aunt, Lydia Marchione as Warren's wife, plus Adam Sullivan, Ronald Naire, Robert Winslade Anderson, Lixin Liu, Amy Kerenza Sedgwick and Sophie Goldrick.Juliet Stevenson was poised and rather moving as Professor Pieixoto, her poignant final envoi to Offred (whose fate remained unknown) emphasising the problem with transporting Margaret Attwood's novel to other genres (opera, television series); Attwood's prose is so wonderful and so luminous, it hardly need amplification in another medium. However Poul Ruders and librettist Paul Bentley make and admirable job of it and by the end of the opera we were indeed […]
2024-01-13 17:21:00
Eavesdropping on their dramas: Opera North's 'in the round' production Britten's Albert Herring
Britten: Albert Herring - Claire Pascoe, Dafydd Jones - Opera North (Photo: Tom Arber) Britten: Albert Herring; Judith Howarth, Heather Shipp, Amy Freston, William Dazeley, Paul Nilon, Richard Mosley-Evans, Dominic Sedgwick, Dafydd Jones, Katie Bray, Claire Pascoe, Rosa Sparks Willow Bell, Oliver Mason, director: Giles Havergal/Elaine Tyler-Hall, conductor: Garry Walker; Opera North at the Howard Assembly RoomA wonderfully involving revival of Giles Havergal's intimate, in the round production of Britten's comedy brings out the work's humanityBritten's Albert Herring was written as a relatively portable chamber opera for the English Opera Group. Famously premiered at Glyndebourne in 1947, when John Christie evidently told people he didn't like it, the work has generally been performed in medium to large size theatres. When Giles Havergal directed the work for Opera North in 2013, it was performed not in the Grand Theatre, Leeds, but in the smaller Howard Assembly Room.The production returned to the Howard Assembly […]
2023-07-30 10:58:00
Music of the Muslim counterculture
[…] in the unity of the great faiths and played down the tradition's Islamic roots, while the idiosyncratic version of Sufism advocated by Idries Shah (1924-96) has even less to do with Islam. By contrast, the Darqawi zawiya [Sufi lodge] which Abdalqadir as-Sufi established first in London and then Norfolk strictly observed the prescriptions and proscriptions of Islam and had political as well as spiritual ambitions. In his book Western Sufism the authority on Sufism Mark Sedgwick explains that the Darqawi "Developed both a political program that in theory promoted jihad,and an organisation to prepare for jihad, called the Murabitun. In practice, however, the Murabitun ended up promoting not violence, but classical Islamic scholarship". Ian Dallas' spiritual guide was Sidi Muhammad Ibn Al-Habib, and in 1967 Dallas converted to Islam and took the name Abdalqadir as-Sufi. Five years later he established a Darqawi community in London […]
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