Jennifer Rhys-Davies News
Last update
2024-04-24
Refresh
2018-06-18 08:36:24
Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia at The Grange Festival
Rossini: Il barbiere di Siviglia - Charles Rice & chorus - The Grange Festival (Photo Simon Annand) Rossini Il barbiere di Siviglia; John Irvin, Jose Maria Lo Monaco, Charles Rice, Riccardo Novaro, dir: Stephen Barlow, cond: David Parry; The Grange Festival Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 17 June 2018 Star rating: 4.0 (★★★★) A busily engaging and highly theatrical account of Rossini's comedy Jose Maria Lo MonacoThe Grange Festival (Photo Simon Annand) On a rather grim, cold evening The Grange Festival's lively new production of Rossini's Il barbiere di Siviglia certainly brought a welcome feeling of brightness and warmth. Directed by Stephen Barlow, designed by Andrew D Edwards with lighting by Howard Hudson, cast featured the American tenor John Irvin as Count Almaviva, the Italian mezzo-soprano Jose Maria Lo Monaco as Rosina, the Anglo-French baritone Charles Rice as Figaro and the Italian baritone […]
2017-08-07 18:09:00
Outstanding Modest Mussorgsky Khovanshchina with Semyon Bychkov at the Proms . Outstanding because Bychkov is brilliant, translating the music itself into drama. Khovanshchina isn't really opera. The libretto is confusing : you need to know what's "not" there to understand what it might be about. It I s anti-historical, anti-narrative, adapting the past to comment on the present. The singers sing parts which aren't characters so much as symbols. Bychkov reveals Khovanshchina as a panorama exploring the Russian soul through music. That glorious orchestration expresses the glory of the idea of Russia, an entity far greater than Tsars, streltskys and whoever might be competing for control. Significantly, Khovanshchina is very much a work where grand choruses dominate: the people as enduring community, rather than individuals, who come and go. Thus the expansive orchestral prelude with which the opera begins: lush strings, lyrical woodwinds. Though the […]
2013-12-07 23:26:36
The Man Who Would Be Coleridge-Taylor: An Interview With Adetokumboh M’Cormack
Photo by Birdie Thompson Adetokumboh M’Cormack—the Sierra Leonean actor known for his roles in the war films Blood Diamond and Battle: Los Angeles—is obsessed with the idea of playing Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—the late-Victorian Afro-English classical music composer—in a Hollywood-style feature film. I met Adé on October 8, 2013, in Pasadena, California, after screening my documentary Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and His Music in America, 1900–1912 at Pasadena City College. Over dinner at Plate 38, a restaurant on East Colorado Boulevard, we talked about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Shakespeare, and other things. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Photo by an unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Centre for Performance History, Royal College of Music, London. Certainly, in many ways, Adetokumboh M’Cormack is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Like Coleridge-Taylor, the intonation of his free-flowing casual talk is elegantly British. Like Coleridge-Taylor, he laughs easily and often. Still young enough to look the part of the twenty-two-year-old boy wonder of Royal […]
or
- timeline: Lyrical singers.
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): R...