I have long been a fan of Monteverdi's opera Orfeo: Bold, self-assured reimagining of Monteverdi: Opera North’s Orpheus reviewed
The setting – the whole concept – of Opera North’s new Orpheus is strikingly original and brilliantly achieved. We’re in the back garden of a suburban semi in (let’s say) Leeds, where two families are gathering for a wedding. Orpheus and his friends are semi-posh white kids; Eurydice and her relatives are of Indian heritage. They’re all dressed in their finest, and they’re clearly relaxed with each other, exchanging hugs and smiles. A double orchestra is assembled on the patio: a little baroque band, with Laurence Cummings directing from the harpsichord, and alongside them, led by Jasdeep Singh Degun on sitar, the tablas, bansuris and esrajs of the Indian classical tradition. Anna Himali Howard’s direction makes it all look wholly natural; only the weird colours that occasionally flush the West Riding sky suggest that higher powers might be in play.
Very reimagined from the sound of it.
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Should admirers of The Beatles shell out $100 for the new five-CD Revolver set? You got me. And I think that Revolver and the White Album are the best albums.
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And speaking of The Beatles, can Jack White really identify any Beatles song from hearing just one second?
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Offered without comment: SINGERS PLAN LEGAL ACTION AGAINST SALZBURG FESTIVAL
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Here's at look at the people behind the Ballets Russes who were not named Stravinsky: How Sergei Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes Revolutionized Dance.
One defining characteristic of Sergei Diaghilev’s personality, complementary to his capacity to make things happen and get things done, was a low boredom threshold. It was this almost irritable restlessness that lay behind his much-quoted exhortation to the young poet Jean Cocteau, a tiresome opportunist hanging on to the Ballets Russes’s coat-tails in Paris as he angled to be given his big chance. “Étonne-moi, Jean,” Diaghilev challenged him, perhaps with a note of impatience. Buzz off until you can show me something fascinatingly different. Cocteau would certainly try.
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And here I thought we were all living in a post-Christian culture: A New Setting for Christianity’s Most Important Story.
Every Good Friday, the story of Jesus Christ’s final hours gets told anew. Trial. Condemnation. Procession. Crucifixion. Burial. During that service, worshippers traditionally meditate on the 14 Stations of the Cross, the summary images of the son of God’s last moments — a stand-in for bona fide pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
In The Street, a new evening-length cycle for harp, narrator, and singer(s), composer Nico Muhly and librettist Alice Goodman treat the 14 stations with the immediacy of a witness — at one moment a passive, descriptive onlooker, at the next a malicious actor who intentionally trips Jesus under the weight of his own cross, close enough to smell the dripping blood.
“When you pray the stations, you’re not supposed to imagine you’re Jesus or Mary or anyone important,” said Goodman during an animated Zoom conversation that included Muhly and harpist Parker Ramsay, who conceived and premiered the work. “You’re supposed to imagine that you’re a little nobody at the edge of the crowd, receiving this event and taking it in and walking along.”
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Here is a performance of Possente spirito from Monteverdi's Orfeo:
And here is the new 2022 mix of "Rain":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrEgtOeJGzQ
Since we haven't put up a performance for several months, here is Petrushka:
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