If you can embrace it, lockdown’s shift from the real to the virtual is a liberation that makes anything possible.
music
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 – The Idea of North: Charles Rammelkamp reviews Alan Catlin’s poetic sketch of the life of pianist Glenn Gould
Bernstein’s 45-minute, one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti is his only oeuvre for which he wrote both words and music and he made the language plain to ensure realism.
U.S. folk musician Jay Ungar composed his Ashokan Farewell in 1982 shortly after violin and dance camps he had been running in Ashokan, New York state, ended for the season.
For those suffering withdrawal symptoms, Stay at Home with Crazy Coqs is providing a thrice-weekly fix on YouTube as some of its regular artists post recordings from their homes or reissue previous Crazy Coqs performances.
Isadora Duncan (1877-1927) has been re-visioned by Viviana Durante in her new programme Don’t Let Them Tame You.
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.
By Barbara Lewis • music, opera, performance, theatre, year 2020 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, music, opera, performance, theatre