Poetry review – RANSOM: Thomas Ovans particularly admires the Olivier Messiaen inspired central section of a new collection by Michael Symmons Roberts
music
CALLED BACK: Neil Fulwood is impressed by John Hinshelwood’s CD of songs and instrumentals inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poems
WE COME FROM THE SUN: Sue Wallace-Shaddad leads us through an innovative album of poetry, music and sound compiled by Cerys Matthews
L’Heure Espagnole, Grange Park Opera – an hour of escape into Maurice Ravel’s gloriously light opera bouffe that allows a woman to juggle three lovers with impunity.
Even more than an outpouring of passionate pacifism, Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave is a universal exploration of the heroic strength of character required to reject decades of blind allegiance to an unholy cause.
If you can embrace it, lockdown’s shift from the real to the virtual is a liberation that makes anything possible.
Grange Park Opera Interim Season. Simon Keenlyside: An Autumn Walk in Wales (available online). Review by Barbara Lewis: Context is all, says Simon Keenlyside, as for the second time this year he delivers a musical tour of his own personal context – the woods around his Welsh home.
A Feast in The Time of Plague, Grange Park Opera online. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Poetry review – MOMENTS MUSICAUX: Alwyn Marriage tunes in to a musically themed chapbook by John Greening
An unexpected joy of lockdown is seeing world-class performers in their natural habitats. Habitat is the apposite word for Simon Keenlyside, who read zoology at Cambridge before focusing on his operatic career and who describes a love of nature as “the marrow” of his existence. He looks to music for its validation.
For Wasfi Kani, the unstoppable founder of Grange Park Opera, even a pandemic is only a temporary setback. As soon as she had accepted this summer’s country house opera season at The Theatre in the Woods was lost, she set about mobilising the “pandemicists” and amassing funding for a Found season.
Poetry review – SERVICE CANCELLED: Michael Bartholomew-Biggs is impressed by Neil Fulwood’s novel approach to the lockdown poem
By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • books, music, poetry reviews, year 2021 • Tags: books, Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, music, poetry