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 […]

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 […]

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 […]