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Sam Smith

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Smith

Sam

Londres

United Kingdom

Chroniqueur depuis le 11 March 2015

Toutes ses chroniques .180

First Rate Performances in Revival of David Alden’s Jenufa at...

Sam Smith

Jenůfa, which premiered in Brno in 1904, is an opera in three acts by Leoš Janáček to a Czech libretto by the composer. It is based on the play Její pastorkyňa by Gabriela Preissová, and is one of the very first operas to be written in prose. Set in a Moravian village in the nineteenth century, the plot concerns a series of tangled relationships, deriving from the fact that two brothers died leaving behind both children and stepchildren. The elder...


Sarah Angliss’s Giant Enjoys its London Premiere at the Royal ...

Sam Smith

Giant, with music by Sarah Angliss and libretto by Ross Sutherland, was commissioned by Britten Pears Arts and first appeared at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2023. It explores the relationship between the eighteenth century British surgeon John Hunter and Charles Byrne who, measuring seven feet, seven inches (judged by his skeletal remains) was known as ‘The Irish Giant’. Following Byrne’s death in 1783, Hunter arranged for his body to be stolen while it was on its way to...


Third Revival of Tim Albery’s The Flying Dutchman at the Royal...

Sam Smith

The Flying Dutchman, which premiered in Dresden in 1843, is the fourth of Richard Wagner’s thirteen operas, and considered to be his first mature one. This is because it is the first still to be regularly staged, with Wagner himself having ruled that the three that preceded it should never be performed at his Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. The composer had been inspired to write the opera following a stormy sea crossing he made from Riga to London in 1839, and the story is taken from...


Fourteenth Revival of Jonathan Miller’s The Barber of Seville ...

Sam Smith

Several composers have based operas on plays in Pierre Beaumarchais’s Figaro trilogy, which comprises The Barber of Seville (1775), The Marriage of Figaro (1784) and The Guilty Mother (1792). By far the most famous of these were written by Mozart, whose 1786 opera has its origins in the second, and Rossini, who in 1816 utilised the first for his own comic masterpiece. Like Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier that were to...


An Intense and Engaging Production of The Handmaid’s Tale at t...

Sam Smith

Written in 1998 to a libretto by Paul Bentley, Poul Ruders’s The Handmaid’s Tale is based on Margaret Atwood’s eponymous novel of 1985. This means that when he wrote it no-one had even heard of Bruce Miller’s television series that aired in 2017. English National Opera first staged the work in 2003, and then introduced a new production by ENO’s Artistic Director Annilese Miskimmon in 2022. This version has now returned, under revival director James...


Christof Loy’s New and Nuanced Production of Elektra at the Ro...

Sam Smith

Based on the Sophocles tragedy, Richard Strauss’s Elektra of 1909 represents the first of his several collaborations with librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who in this instance had already written an eponymous play. It is the second of Strauss’s two highly modernist operas, and deploys dissonance, chromaticism and extremely fluid tonality to an even greater degree than his first, Salome.  The opera is expressionistic in every sense since the adaptation of the...