Opera Room, a company that is dedicated to writing and producing new operatic works whilst maintaining a classical flair, presents a new “classically modern” opera by Richard Knight and Norman Welch in the studio space of the Arcola Theatre.
Opera Room, a company that is dedicated to writing and producing new operatic works whilst maintaining a classical flair, presents a new “classically modern” opera by Richard Knight and Norman Welch in the studio space of the Arcola Theatre.
It is a wonderful thing to have the inadvertently selective seats of an Opera performance made available and potentially appealing to a general audience. The availability side of things has been tackled by the Arcola’s Grimeborn Festival, which for nine years has been opening its doors to a wide range of more experimental Opera shows for a refreshingly accessible price. The appealing side has to then be ingeniously approached by the varied selection of Opera makers using the Arcola’s studio spaces, the performers and their wits as vessels. With a performance of Richard Strauss’s Daphne (and a libretto written by Joseph Gregor), it is Jose Gandia as the director and conductor that puts on an enjoyable but in no way extraordinary performance that I have had the chance to see.
As part of the Grimeborn Festival at the Arcola Theatre, Fulham Opera presents Verdi’s final opera in a modern version with Keel Watson as Sir John Falstaff. The independent opera company usually produces large scale works in the intimate space of St. John’s Church in Fulham.
How to review a play that dictates reality so thoroughly on its own terms? Marsha: A girl Who Does Bad Things invites us into a claustrophobic world where logic does not obtain and reason has no purchase. In so doing, the operetta offers a palpable experience of mental disturbance and some rather oblique insights into the topic…It also offers, a headache to any reviewer trying to describe the experience!
For an onlooker to observe a piece of art and to recognise the artist at the blink of an eye is testament to that artists contribution to their field. The Persistance of Memory is notably, if not Salvador Dali‘s most famous work, a portrait depicting a number of melting clocks in a barren landscape renders a series of question marks. The man behind the portrait is celebrated for his contribution to the surrealist movement, however many may not be as aware about his wife and muse, Gala Dali.
The Grimeborn Festival at the Arcola Theatre is back for its ninth year. Offering reimagined classics, obscure masterpieces, and interesting new work, Grimeborn is one of the summer festival highlights in London, taking opera aficionados on a journey of discovery. One of the productions definitely worth seeing is Gariné by Dikran Tchouhadjian, the first opera composer of the Ottoman Empire and known during his lifetime as “the Armenian Verdi” and “the Oriental Offenbach”.