Francesc Mariner News
Spanish composer, organist of the Barcelona Cathedral
- pipe organ
- Spain
- organist, composer
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2024-04-25
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2024-04-06 08:42:00
Spell Book, Witch & Stone Fruit: composer Freya Waley-Cohen on the power of ritual and spells
[…] Book as a dramatic concert work, so it can be staged but this adds another layer of someone else's interpretation, rather than her's. She does not feel that the work needs staging, and in February 2024 there was simply a use of lighting, and little else, creating a dramatic concert. Her 2020 opera, WITCH, was inspired by Rebecca Tamás' book but very little of the poetry made it into the opera; the libretto, by Ruth Mariner, took the work in a different direction because of the need to have a narrative.Having lived with the ideas of Spell Book since 2019, with the Barbican concert and the recording, Freya sees the project as complete. This isn't the first time that she has had ideas that developed into complete projects, but it is always good to come out the other side. That said, Rebecca Tamás' work is incredibly inspiring and Freya will […]
2022-03-27 14:25:00
Lamento d'Arianna, Ariadne auf Naxos (Prologue), and Witch (world premiere), Royal Academy Opera, 23 March 2022
[…] April Dalton (designs) Jake Wiltshire (lighting) Hayley Egan (video) Ensemble singers and actors Royal Academy Sinfonia Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor) Sarah (Sophie Sparrow)Image: Craig Fuller Commissioning a new opera for its 200th anniversary, and then staging and performing it with such excellence, are laudable things for the Royal Academy of Music to have done. If only, alas, the world premiere of WITCH, music by Freya Waley-Cohen and libretto by Ruth Mariner, had shown us a superior work than it did. The problem lay at least as much, probably more, with Mariner’s libretto, weirdly devoid of dramatic intent, let alone achievement, but it would be difficult to make claims for Waley-Cohen as a musical dramatist either. What is WITCH ‘about’? A bullied teenage girl alone in her bedroom, save for a giant rabbit (I don’t know either), finds solace and ultimately takes action through discovery of […]
2021-09-08 08:47:00
'I dig Strauss and Wagner – those cats are good'
[…] to win a new audience. Jimi Hendrix shared a management agent with the progressive rock and jazz fusion band Soft Machine, and Soft Machine supported Hendrix on his 1968 North American tour. In 1970 William Glock was Controller of the Proms. On 13th August 1970 - just two weeks before the Isle of Wight Festival - there was an all-Bach Prom at 7.00pm in the Royal Albert Hall with a star-studded cast including Neville Mariner, Philip Ledger, David Munrow, and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. This was followed at 10.00pm by a late-night Prom with Soft Machine, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and conductors David Atherton, and Elgar Howarth. This concert, which was broadcast on BBC TV, opened with works by Terry Riley and Tim Souster, and then showcased three tracks from Soft Machine's Third album. Can you imagine the outcry from on Slipped Disc and in […]
2020-10-12 08:35:33
A Life On-Line: Walton & Sitwell in Art-Deco splendour, Handel in Italy, Purcell in London, Frederic Rzewski in New York
Reginald Mobley & Quodlibet Ensemble at Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York City The Freemasons Hall might seem a strange location for William Walton and Edith Sitwell's entertainment, Facade, yet the work premiered in 1923 and the Freemasons Hall opened just 10 years later, so an art deco masterpiece is not quite as unlikely as it may seem. London Mozart Players performed Facade at the Freemasons Hall as part of its on-line Classical Club, joining with conductor Benjamin Pope and actor Samuel West. Sitwell's poems were not necessarily written for Walton, they come from a collection in which she was experimenting with rhythm, they are about rhythms rather than sense. Butcommentators suggest a closely argued logic to the allusions the text with a number of references to Sitwell's childhood (the Mariner man is her father's valet and black Mrs Behemoth, Sitwell's mother). So, I have to confess that I […]
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