Grimeborn Opera Festival / Reseñas
Reseñas de producciones pasadas
23The British-Irish soprano Hazel Neighbour gives a fiery performance as the Empress Ottavia who, even when she sees the writing on the wall, fights hard to retain her position.
There are some outstanding voices among the rest of Ensemble OrQuesta, soprano Hazel Neighbour commands the stage with her Ottavia.
It is a beautiful, moving piece of opera to which director Aylin Bozok brings a delicate and spine-tingling element. The French libretto by Edouard Blau, Paul Milliet and Georges Hartman is exquisitely sung by the cast, in particular Katie Bray as the dutiful Charlotte and Adam Tunnicliffe as the sorrowful and intense Werther, both of whose voices are as impressive as they are beautiful.
Biraj Barkakaty gets the part of Bell-Nicholls spot on, The role is a great countertenor part, for Barkakaty has a fine singing voice.
Biraj Barkakaty’s fine countertenor.
Biraj Barkakaty, a countertenor, who provides the thrills only that voice can close-up and personal.
The Grimeborn Opera Festival at the Arcola Theatre often proves a revelatory showcase for new writers and musicians, but it’s hard to imagine a more personal composition than Matt Geer’s Sane and Sound, performing for only the second time. Based on Geer’s notebooks from a period of hospitalisation for Schizo-affective disorder, it is a show that in many ways defies assessment. Purposefully created to include no straightforward narrative arc, no protagonist or deterministic structure, Sane and Soundimmerses the audience in the experience of mental illness with its paranoid delusions, rapid changes of mood and the side effects of treatment. The control Geer exerts over this story is merely to marshal thoughts, feelings, beliefs and hallucinations into musical and dramatic form. It’s not something you see in opera very often, so the usual shape and combination of operatic and choral sounds, acted scenes and dance make this an engaging mixed-media piece that dissolves different kinds of boundaries. The looseness of its form, the episodic nature of the experience will be more familiar to theatregoers where similar approaches have been in used in productions such as People, Places and Things, as well as the recent Rivers in the Skywhich looked at storytelling and grief.
Simon Wilding's deeply evil Hunding is so well sung that one feels sad that he loses so much of his music in the cuts
Simon Wilding’s unsettling, convincing Hunding uses his huge voice as a weapon, to brilliant (near comic) effect.
Simon Wilding was an imposing Fafner and Wilding was an implacable Hunding, very much the dramatic lynchpin of the evening
