The gods diminished – ETO Iphégenie en Tauride
English Touring Opera’s disturbing and finely sung production of Gluck’s Iphégenie en Tauride shows up the futility of trying to blame everything on the gods.
ETO – autumn ticket offer
English Touring Opera have just announced their dates in Durham for their autumn productions. Following their triple bill of baroque opera last year, they’re bringing us more Handel on 5 November – this time it’s Ottone – one of his finest tragedies, packed with arias that are regularly performed in concert. The other production, on 4 […]
ETO – King Priam
English Touring Opera bring their award winning production of Tippett’s King Priam to the Gala next week. Read my preview and watch ETO’s trailer here – then book your ticket, because this looks like something not to be missed.
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 […]
