Contents
FRONT OF HOUSE EDITORIAL The singing revolution LETTERS Your views and suggestions PROLOGUE Grand Opera at a price you can afford NEWS & NOTES English Touring Opera launches spring season, Rossini Opera Festival restores its summer programme, remembering Maria Ewing LETTER FROM… Karlsruhe, Germany –a modern home for Handel opera BLURRING BOUNDARIES Ulster Touring Opera sets forth in the Irish borderlands
REVIEWS - LIVE REVIEWS English National Opera The Valkyrie (50); London Fringe Round-up: New Sussex Opera La princesse de Trébizonde (53) The Opera Company, Rameau’s Roots (54); Royal Northern College of Music Double Bill: Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos/ The Medium (55) Gothenburg Opera Götterdammerung (58); Metropolitan Opera Eurydice (61); Greek National Opera The Murderess (64) - RECORDINGS New releases on CD & DVD including Jakub Józef Orliński’s latest solo album, a new studio recording of Verdi’s Macbeth – in French, Weinberg’s The Passenger from Graz, Donizetti’s Linda di Chamounix and French Baroque opera by Mondonville. Our Opera Now Choice is Alla Napoletana featuring Christina Pluhar and L’Arpeggiata
- SPOTLIGHT World Wide Opera Guide and answers to last issue’s Quiz
COVER PHOTO: MICHAEL COOPER MAKE-UP AND HAIR: SHARON RYMAN
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‘Going onstage is very cathartic. If you have any issues, any sadness in your personal life, it just comes off on stage. I leave it behind, I no longer carry it on into my life’
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CONTENTS
Queen Sondra American-Canadian soprano Sondra Radvanovsky presents her pièce de resistance as Donzetti’s Three Tudor Queens, showcasing her brilliant virtuosic and dramatic skills across three epic operas at the Teatro San Carlo in Naples this month. She discusses the contrasts and challenges with Helena Matheopoulos Celebrating Renata Tebaldi We pay tribute to the queen of the Met and La Scala who was born a century ago this month What makes a ‘Brünnhilde voice’? A new book investigates the power
Director’s Cut Verdi goes Zen in Robert Wilson’s slow-motion Otello
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and the glory of the Wagnerian Heroine. And we revisit an elegant explanation of the phenomenon by the late John Steane Blue murder A new opera exploring racism and brutality in the police force has been winning acclaim in the US. Librettist and director Tazewell Thompson introduces us to Blue My Favourite Things Tenor Allan Clayton – a footballmad giant panda lover Quiz Test your knowledge of British royalty – as opera would have it www.operanow.co.uk
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