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8Theirs is a seamless ensemble of shamanic intensity, they’re also a bit fly, very fly. An alt documentary fly on a graffiti-dripping wall scribbling liminal and subliminal insistent cyphers across our collective psyche. Urgent, urban guerilla dark-ops opera, immediate and intimidatingly angsty – out to get you. So, this take on Purcell’s baroque masterpiece, Dido And Aeneas, is understandably (just about) somewhat liberal in its contemporaneous settings and troubling themes. Theme one, presumably that all men are bastards! But so much more.
Its last production involved camels, a floating orchestra and a string quartet performing from helicopters. So the pressure is certainly on for Birmingham Opera Company to come up with something even more spectacular. Khovanskygate: A National Enquiry may take place on the ground, but it is the company’s biggest production to date. And it has managed to be highly topical, with its themes of Russian revolution, despite being written 140 years ago by Modest Musorgsky.
For those who find Polovtsian Dances in sequinned Hammer pants too saccharine for their tastes, Graham Vick's Birmingham Opera Company present a hardcore alternative later this month - an English language adaptation of Musorgsky's Khovanshchina.
