Leif Roar News
Danish opera singer and singer (1937-2003)
- baritone
- Denmark
- opera singer, singer
Last update
2024-03-24
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2024-02-08 08:14:00
Sitting in a concert hall is not a great place to have a musical experience: Frederick Waxman introduces Our Mother, Figure's dramatic staging of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater
This is my body Buxtehude's Membra Jesu Nostri from Figure at the Swiss Church in 2023The ensemble Figure, co-artistic directors Frederick Waxman and Philip Barrett, has had some considerable success with its stagings at Opera Holland Park of Handel's Serse (in 2022) and Shakespeare/Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream (in 2023), but last year the company also created a remarkable immersive staging Buxtehude's sacred cantata sequence Membra Jesu Nostri [see my review].From 20 to 23 March 2024 they will be presenting Our Mother at Stone Nest. This will be a dramatised staging of Pergolesi's Stabat Mater with additional music by Alex Mills. Directed by Sophie Daneman, the staging will be performed by women of multiple generations, Dame Emma Kirkby, Catherine Carby, Rowan Pierce and Katie MacDonald.When I chatted to Frederick Waxman about the production he commented that whilst everyone knows the first 20 seconds or so of Pergolesi's music, they wanted […]
The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2024-01-24 01:17:22
BMInt presents a not-so-short history of Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District in connection with the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s first performances of the complete opera on January 25th and 27th. Tickets HERE On January 26, 1936, Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was presented in Moscow. This was not breaking news. Lady Macbeth had enjoyed almost simultaneous premieres in 1934, at the Maly Opera Theatre in Leningrad on January 22 and then at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre in Moscow two days later. The piece had elicited high praise from the February 1st edition of Soviet Art: Shostakovich’s new opera is indisputably one of the most significant achievements of our musical and theatrical life. It is in truth the first great, truly outstanding and masterfully constructed operatic work to have been composed in the 16 years since the October Revolution. Over the following two years, […]
2023-09-20 06:51:00
Why the wait? Ethel Smyth's first major success, Der Wald, finally receives its premiere recording in a terrific account from John Andrews and BBC Symphony Orchestra
Ethel Smyth: Der Wald; Natalya Romaniw, Claire Barnett-Jones, Robert Murray, Andrew Shaw, Morgan Pearse, BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Orchestra, conductor John Andrews; Resonus ClassicsEthel Smyth's first major success receives its premiere recording, revealing a striking piece of late-Romanticism in a terrific and wonderfully empathetic performanceWhen the guns began to Roar and the armies march at the beginning of World War I, it marked a significant divide in Ethel Smyth's career. German-trained, she had remained something of a German composer, performances of her work across Europe being far more common than in England. In 1914, she had major European performances of her operas planned, the two being Der Wald and Strandrecht (the German version of The Wreckers). Whilst she had already started work on her lighter opera, The Boatswain's Mate, you do wonder what Smyth's career would have been like without the interruption of war. Never again would she write large-scale […]
2023-08-18 07:00:40
The singer’s Roar is as impressive as ever but he also deploys other vocal styles to fine effect in his third album
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