Paul Nilon News
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2024-04-25
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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 […]
2022-06-13 09:07:49
[…] in the theatre, though Daniel Slater’s new Grange festival staging admirably captures its intensity and sombre ambiguities. Slater hauls the work forward to the present, setting it in a labyrinthine bunker-cum-palace, strikingly designed by Robert Innes Hopkins, where Raffaele Pe’s Tamerlano – charismatic, if deadly, in leather, brocade and bling – toys with the lives and liberties of his prisoners and victims, his manipulations breeding deceit and equivocation in a world in which only Paul Nilon’s morally principled Bajazet values his integrity over his life. Feigning compliance, Sophie Bevan’s Asteria secretly plots murder, while Andronico (Patrick Terry) alternately fawns sycophantically and bribes Tamerlano’s henchmen for the sake of his own and others’ survival. By the end, though, it is apparent that Angharad Lyddon’s proud, calculating Irene will prove more than a match for the man she is determined to control in her turn. In rep at the
2022-06-13 08:41:20
Baroque mind games: Handel's Tamerlano at The Grange Festival
Handel:Tamerlano - The Grange Festival (Photo Simon Anand) Handel: Tamerlano; Raffaele Pe, Paul Nilon, Sophie Bevan, Patrick Terry, Angharad Lyddon, director: Daniel Slater, conductor: Robert Howarth, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; The Grange FestivalReviewed 10 June 2022 (★★★★★) Strong performances and an intelligently modern-dress staging make Handel's darkest operatic drama a gripping evening Tamerlano is regarded as one of Handel's greatest operas yet productions of it in the UK have been few and far between in recent years, but that has all changed. Cambridge Handel Opera, the Grange Festival and English Touring Opera are all addressing the work, whilst Irish National Opera looked at Vivaldi's take on the same story. Opera seria is such that each production can be somewhat different, taking a different route to addressing the fundamental issues at stake in the opera. Whilst Tamerlano does contain two of the greatest dramatic scenes that Handel wrote in his Italian operas, the opera's complex […]
2020-02-21 10:32:14
Opera North in 2020/21, new opera from Iain Bell and Will Todd, Handel's Alcina and a first Parsifal
[…] and Sandra Piques Eddy, and will be paired with a new dance version of Bernstein's West Side Story Symphonic Dances created by choreographer Aletta Collins with Phoenix Dance Company. Jonathan Heyward conducts both.The Spring 2021 season is completed with a revival of Aletta Collins's production of Puccini's La Fanciulla del West with Magdalena Molendowska [who sang Katerina in Martinu's The Greek Passion last year, see my review], Eric Greene and Rafael Rojas, conducted by Paul Nilon. Garry Walker conducting the Orchestra of Opera North (Photo Justin Slee) The orchestra's concert season will include two concerts with Garry Walker, Britten, Elgar and Shostakovich in December 2020, and Mark Anthony Turnage, Britten and Elgar in 2021. There will also be concerts with Sian Edwards, Duncan Ward and Jaume Santonja. David Greed, the longest-standing leader of any UK orchestra, marks his final year at Opera North before his retirement with a performance […]
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