Cracks of thunder, road rage, intermittent sirens and a barking dog: the brave members of HGO faced stiff competition during last night’s performance of Sāvitri. And that was before it started to rain. Lucky, then, that the prospect of a living, breathing opera – experienced without the pallid glow of a computer screen – was too enticing for such trifles to matter.
By Jeffrey Arlo Brown, Timmy Fisher and Hartmut Welscher
Not long after the last global pandemic, in which some 50 million people died from Spanish flu, a social change began to take place in living rooms across the world. With the dawn of radio, and later television, the parlor gatherings and upright pianos that had once been the focus of evening entertainment were gradually phased out. A century later, with a new pandemic sweeping the globe, classical music has never felt more under threat …
Last week I was lucky enough to meet Errollyn Wallen, the Belize-born composer whose BBC Proms commission, This Frame is Part of the Painting, will be premiered next month at the Royal Albert Hall. We chatted about her career and the influence of artists like Howard Hodgkin on her work, before moving on to a more general discussion on the state of classical music today…
In a week in which Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor opens at Zurich’s Opernhaus, Verdi’s Aida at the Met and Adams’ Girls of the Golden West at the Dutch National Opera – all of which feature a female protagonist, and yet have been produced by teams almost exclusively made up of men – how refreshing it was to open last night’s programme and discover that (almost) the entire creative team for Dani Howard’s brand-new opera Robin Hood are women. A further irony – that the opera documents the shenanigans of an all-male, masonic brotherhood – was not lost on me either.
The 9th Symphony at Brexit’s 11th hour
Beethoven is not part of Simon Wallfisch’s typical repertoire. The revered baritone and cellist, who will be performing Schubert’s Winterreise on the 15th in Oxford, could have spent his Wednesday afternoon rehearsing, but has instead chosen to brave the ‘poisonous’ Westminster atmosphere in order to sing ‘Ode to Joy’ in protest against Brexit…
