Baroque ornamentation workshop
Some notes from the workshop I attended on baroque ornamentation run by Evelyn Nallen for the Durham Branch of Society of Recorder Players – with useful reminders for me of what we learnt.
Organ recital – Dr Ian Brunt
My review of a recital of baroque chorale preludes played by Dr Ian Brunt at St Helen Auckland that reminded me that there is more to organ music than the pull-out-all-the-stops variety.
November – baroque month
My friends and family will no doubt see the title of this post and wonder what’s different, but this month, there seems to be even more baroque music going on in my life than usual, with my first ever chance to see live baroque opera, and my first ever St Matthew Passion.
Poppea and Nero: a dangerous liaison
If you’ve been following my series of posts about the Venetian operas that ETO are bringing to Durham next week, you’ll remember I said that at the end of Agrippina everything ended happily. Well, not for long, because in terms of plot, Handel’s opera is just a prequel to Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea and this time, things […]
Unheroic Jason
It’s easy to think that we know the story of Jason – it’s a standard in every child’s book of Greek Myths, the hero who overcomes impossible challenges to claim the prize of the Golden Fleece, helped by the lovely witch-princess Medea who has conveniently fallen in love with him. There’s not much of this […]
Agrippina – Tiger Mother
Agrippina is one of those big characters in Roman history – sister of Caligula, niece and wife of Claudius and mother of Nero, she seems to have spent her life embroiled in scandal and notoriety. Given this subject matter though, and the baroque tendency to delight in excesses of all kinds, Handel’s Agrippina is remarkably […]
ETO Venetian opera
Baroque opera has been a surprisingly recent discovery for me. It’s so obviously the sort of thing I would like — there’s an intoxicating mix of passion, bad behaviour, sex, tragedy, strong female characters, lots of semiquavers, and, sometimes, recorders — that I wonder what took me so long. There’s more of it about these […]
