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      Shock of the old: nine disturbing, disruptive and demonic clowns

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 13:29

    For centuries, they have been subversive speakers of truth to power – and a focus for our fears. Why do clowns provoke such strong emotions?

    Perhaps more than other Shocks of the Old, today’s needs a content warning because much of humanity is scared of clowns. In 2022, of 987 respondents to the Fear of Clowns Questionnaire, or FCQ (yes, a real thing ) 272 (27.6%) reported “a fear of clowns, while 50 (5.1%) rated this fear as extreme”.

    In a controversial ( with clowns ) 2008 survey of more than 250 children, every single one said they disliked clown decor in hospitals . “We found that clowns are universally disliked by children,” said the study lead, Dr Penny Curtis. “Some found them quite frightening and unknowable.”

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      The Guardian view on opera and circus: a populist pairing that scales the heights | Editorial

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 6 days ago - 18:25 · 1 minute

    Featuring awe-inspiring aerial antics, Welsh National Opera’s Death In Venice shows how innovative the art form can still be

    Conversation about opera has become an increasingly cronky merry-go-round over the last few years, revolving not around art and imagination so much as money, elitism and whether or not the repertoire is refreshing itself at a rate that makes any significant contribution to a modern creative environment. Much of the latest discontent has focused on the forced move of the English National Opera (ENO) from its London redoubt – the Coliseum – to Manchester where, until its new home is built, it will do the rounds of existing venues.

    So it is refreshing to find Welsh National Opera (WNO) out on the road with a revival that stares down many of the resulting anxieties, while reframing the underlying debates in a way that detractors of the art form would do well to heed. After opening its new season with an old repertory staple, Così fan Tutte, it is touring Benjamin Britten’s more challenging Death in Venice , about the fixation of an ageing writer for a beautiful young boy he spots in a Venice that is succumbing to a cholera epidemic. The opera itself is obviously not new. Based on a novella by Thomas Mann, it premiered just two years after Visconti’s famous 1971 film. But half a century on, social attitudes to the themes it addresses – gay love, obsessive desire, and the morally hazy relationship of artist to muse – have changed, giving a fresh resonance to its meditations.

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      Duke Bluebeard’s Castle review – erotic, unsettling and beautifully staged

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 6 days ago - 15:07

    Coliseum, London
    A last-minute cast substitution added a remarkable gender twist to Bartók’s opera about marital disintegration

    The first night of English National Opera ’s Bluebeard’s Castle (billed as a “concert semi-staging”, though there is considerably more to it than that) turned out to be unique, startling and completely unforgettable, thanks in no small measure to the unusual circumstances that surrounded it. Allison Cook, cast as Judith, withdrew from the performance late in the day because of illness. With only two hours’ rehearsal, Jennifer Johnston sang, not from the side of the stage, as one might expect, but as a costumed, albeit largely immobile presence within Joe Hill-Gibbins’s production. The role was acted, meanwhile, wonderfully well, by Crispin Lord, one of ENO’s staff directors, handsome yet androgynous in a white singlet and silk skirt, so that Bluebeard’s final partner, in a remarkable twist, effectively becomes his husband rather than his wife.

    Bypassing at a stroke the perceived gender polarities that inform Bartók ’s examination of marital disintegration, the end result is at once strikingly erotic and profoundly unsettling, particularly within the context of Hill-Gibbins’s chillingly beautiful staging.

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      Our Mother review – reimagination of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater has a timeless directness and simplicity

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 6 days ago - 08:04 · 1 minute

    Stone Nest, London
    Historical ensemble Figure and an excellent cast explore grief, compassion and hope through five women representing multiple generations

    Performed by Figure , and the brainchild of the ensemble’s founder and musical director Frederick Waxman, Our Mother in some ways resists classification, though in essence it is a music theatre piece that takes Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater as its starting point for an exploration of the nature of grief. It’s not for purists. Pergolesi’s 1736 masterpiece is frequently considered contemplative and serene, and indeed some of it is. But in depicting Christ’s crucifixion, it is also, as Waxman puts it, “an evolving reflection on a mother watching her child die”, and a fierce anguish consequently offsets its moments of calm. Along with director Sophie Daneman, Waxman’s aim has been to reimagine it in terms of a communal exploration of bereavement and compassion, beyond its immediate theological context.

    The piece itself has been expanded with a prelude and interludes by Welsh-born composer Alex Mills , in which rhythmic and melodic fragments from the original morph into passacaglias and threnodies that have a timeless directness and simplicity. Pergolesi’s two singers have become five, representing multiple generations of women, who shuttle the vocal lines between them, both within arias and ensembles: the great Emma Kirkby, now in her seventies, is the eldest; the youngest, Nadya Pickup, is in her teens.

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      In the name of anti-elitism, Arts Council England has declared war on opera and excellence | Catherine Bennett

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 17 March - 07:00

    ‘Good’ singers performing great music by dead people. Who’d listen to that?

    For an organisation so full of surprises – one day on funding, another on restricting free speech – Arts Council England remains remarkably consistent on one point: like many people, it just can’t be doing with opera. Or not, anyway, with most of what’s on offer, what with its unlikely heroics and seducers and obsession with “good” singing.

    Can you believe, ACE offers in a new report about opera in England (“Let’s Create: Opera and Music Theatre Analysis”), which follows on from its opening assault on opera in 2022, how much of the most frequently staged repertory was written over 100 years ago? By literally dead people?

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      Macbeth review – powerful Verdi staging marks the end for a great company

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 15 March - 13:29

    Riverfront, Newport
    Arts Council of Wales’s decision to axe its funding for Mid Wales Opera means this effective and cogent production is likely their last on this scale

    With the peremptory axing of all its funding last September, Mid Wales Opera has already been dealt a deathblow by the Arts Council of Wales. The company’s strong and sterling new Verdi staging – now confirmed as its last full-scale production – makes the council’s decision look all the more ludicrous.

    Fielding a cast of 17, and the 16 musicians of Ensemble Cymru plus a community chorus, this may not be full-scale Verdi, but there is absolutely no compromise on integrity. With some fine musical characterisation from the principals as well as those in cameo roles, and a particularly blazing finale to act one, there is a wonderful sense of a defiant upholding of MWO values by artistic director/designer Richard Studer and music director Jonathan Lyness. It is as good a production as any in their 20-year tenure.

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      ROH Madama Butterfly review – Grigorian inhabits the part to a degree one does not often experience

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 15 March - 12:12

    Royal Opera House, London
    Asmik Grigorian is the standout attraction in this revival of Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s 2003 uncluttered production

    There is continuing debate about how to stage Madama Butterfly in the 21st century – and even whether to stage it all. Covent Garden’s programme book for this ninth revival of Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s straightforward and uncluttered 2003 production goes through these uncomfortable issues of race, gender and politics at length. But, as Kunio Hara’s essay admits, the reality remains that audiences keep coming back to Madama Butterfly because of the emotional truth of the human voice in Puccini’s music.

    And that is emphatically true in this revival. Performances of Madama Butterfly do not necessarily stand or fall by the performance of the title role. There is too much else of musical and operatic interest in Puccini’s dark masterpiece for that. But Asmik Grigorian (who shares the role of Cio-Cio-San with Hrachuhí Bassénz in this run) is beyond question the standout attraction here.

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      The Seven Deadly Sins review – LPO play Brecht and Weill with bite and swing

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 15 March - 12:11 · 1 minute

    Battersea Arts Centre, London
    Danielle de Niese took on twinned roles of dancer and singer Anna with great style, the evening introduced by João Barradas’s fiery accordion

    The cathedral-like space of Battersea Arts Centre’s Grand Hall, with its high ceilings and distressed walls, is an atmospheric place for the London Philharmonic to decamp to for this performance of The Seven Deadly Sins, the 1933 “sung ballet” that was Kurt Weill and Bertholt Brecht’s last collaboration. That said, prosaically enough it would probably have worked better back home in the Royal Festival Hall. All those unbroken hard surfaces at the BAC make for a cathedral-like acoustic: pitted against a full orchestra, playing with bite and swing for the conductor Edward Gardner, all five singers had to be miked, and the sound system was blunt. Singing the English version by WH Auden and Chester Kallmann, they worked hard but far too much text and nuance got lost.

    At least in Danielle de Niese there was a lead who could carry the show regardless. The role of Anna, who travels round the US losing her Louisiana innocence in order to make money for her family back home, was written to be played by two people, a singer and a dancer: de Niese embodied both. Directed by Dominic Dromgoole, and moving between the front of the stage and platforms to the side and back, de Niese seemed also to play the men who commodify Anna – at least with her hands, which she managed to make seem as if they belonged to someone else. The Greed episode saw her working her way cynically round the men of the orchestra, pocketing tips. Her Greek-chorus family included Adam Gilbert’s clear tenor Father and the resonant bass Callum Thorpe as the drag Mother.

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      Barber of Seville review – high energy, whimsy and Stetsons as Rossini goes to the wild west

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 14 March - 14:53 · 1 minute

    Wilton’s Music Hall, London
    With a dash of Monty Python and a sprinkling of Carry On, Charles Court Opera’s slimmed-down staging of the comic opera is pacy and entertaining

    Imagine the Monty Python team making a foray into bel canto. Or perhaps a Carry On special set in an opera company with little budget but a ready source of Stetsons. Charles Court Opera ’s home turf is the late-Victorian middlebrow silliness of Gilbert and Sullivan , but the company occasionally ventures into other comic opera. In this outing directed by CCO’s artistic director John Savournin , Rossini’s Barber of Seville heads to the wild west (cue saloon doors, bourbon bottles, cowboy hats for all) and revels in a new high-energy, rhyme-fuelled English text by music director David Eaton. “Having a tryst, sir? I can assist, sir”, Figaro advertises in his big Act 1 number. Almaviva’s disguised turn as Rosina’s stand-in singing teacher involves a straw hat and a lot of ribbon, his line in “Nature! Flowers” whimsy smacking of pure Fotherington-Tomas (“Hullo clouds, hullo sky”) from the 1950s Molesworth books .

    It’s all terribly English. There’s a long tradition of English Barbers, of course – right back to a few months after the opera’s UK premiere in 1818, when it was reworked around hits from both Rossini’s and Paisiello’s operas (plus some new music by the tireless adapter Henry Bishop) for performance at Covent Garden. The leading lady apparently “accompanied herself at the piano forte with great taste”, but no review records whether the audience found it funny.

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