Three nights in Venice

I’ve spent the last three evenings in the front row of the Gala Theatre in Durham, immersing myself in baroque Venice, thanks to English Touring Opera. They don’t usually bring their November shows to Durham, but I hope we’ve shown them that there is an audience here for opera beyond the Verdi/Puccini/Mozart classics and that […]

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 […]

ETO Venetian opera

Baroque opera has been a surprisingly recent discovery for me. It’s so obviously the sort of thing I would like — there’s an intoxicating mix of passion, bad behaviour, sex, tragedy, strong female characters, lots of semiquavers, and, sometimes, recorders — that I wonder what took me so long. There’s more of it about these […]