RUSALKA (Glyndebourne Festival Opera)****

By Dave

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyrGRoa7FuI&feature=emb_logo

Available until: Friday 4^th December, 6pm

I possibly shouldn’t be posting this as the opera is Unlisted on youtube and I only found out because I’m subscribed to the ATG Tickets emails and one contained this link. So if anyone wants this taken down, we’re very happy to do that but in the meantime it seems a shame that only ATG tickets supporters can see it. It’s not like we actually pay ATG Tickets anything. Not unless we attend their shows.

But anyway, this is a video of Glyndebourne’s production of Antonín Dvořák’s opera Rusalka which I think is from 2019.

DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NURNBERG (Glyndebourne)****

 

By Dave

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noJI-A9BHKc

Available until: Sunday 6 September, 5pm

They’ve done it to me again! I always get landed with the performance the kids don’t want to review. Still, I can understand if they’re daunted by Wagner. Wagner is… a commitment. Der fliegende Hollander isn’t so bad as it’s fairly short but even with Das Rheingold, you know there are three parts more to go and you’re not even a quarter of the way through because they get longer and longer! I did once listen to the entire Ring Cycle in a day (when I was in my 20s, I never could resist a dare) and I actually ended up liking it more as it went on but would I ever do that again? No. One at a time? Definitely.

THE FAIRY QUEEN (Glyndebourne Festival Opera)****

 

By Louise

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-esDHd6CPc&list=PLpmwWuIh57wY66Jq06IauzKw_EU_iFGAs

Available until: 30^th August, 5pm

The Fairy Queen is quite difficult to classify. The music was written by Henry Purcell as incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and was played between the scenes. The score includes songs, but the singers don’t really have consistent characters or tell a story of their own. Many people call it a semi-opera, which probably also makes it a semi-play, but there is also dancing so is it also partly a ballet? Semi means half so I think if you include ballet, it’s a trient-opera, play and ballet. I’ve watched and I’m still not sure what I’d say it is.

HAMLET (Glyndebourne Festival Opera)****

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKCSZMfkv5k

Available until: Sunday 23^rd August, 9pm

I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy reviewing a version of Hamlet quite so soon after The Show Must Go Online’s magnificent production of Shakespeare’s play, but I reminded myself that an opera is a different medium and probably nearly as different from the play as an Agatha Christie TV adaption is from the actual novel. Actually, the opera was closer to the play than I was expecting, even using Shakespeare’s text, but I did find I was thinking of the opera as a piece on its own merits as an opera, rather than just as a version of the play which inspired it.

GUILIO CESARE (Glyndebourne)*****

 

By Louise

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLyrAaHmdvo

Available until: 5pm, 16th August 2020

This is a production from 2005, about six months before I was born. I obviously don’t remember when it was new but we have it on DVD and even before I watched it for the first time, I knew about the production and some of the circumstances around it. I think it’s clear right from the start how special this performance is. It’s a long opera, at just under four hours (without interval), but the music is so beautiful, the plot is so exciting and the singers make the characters so interesting, even when you don’t like them, it seemed a lot shorter. Even though I knew the opera, it was easy to get caught up in the story and I wanted to see and hear what happened next.