Opera North, in collaboration with Phoenix Dance, bring us a triple bill: two parts Bernstein with a new piece (“Halfway and Beyond”) based on a contemporary poem, sandwiched between. The evening opens with a revival of Matthew Eberhardt’s 2017...
The nice woman working security at the Lowry approaches me with her metal-detecting device.“Do you have a pacemaker,” she asks. “I don’t think so.” This is not to be found on anyone’s list of Sensible Answers. What was I thinking? That some rogue...
I posted a photograph on social media last night, showing the musicians starting to take their seats on stage at the Lowry’s Lyric theatre. You can also make out how thinly populated the auditorium is. “Sparse,” a friend of mine commented. Indeed...
Kurt Weil’s dramatic opera, Street Scene was awarded the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score in 1947. It’s based on a play by Elmer Rice and charts the events that take place over two days in the slums of a New York district. Trailer The...
The night of Opera North’s performance of The Turn of the Screw at The Lowry was a dark and stormy one, fitting weather conditions for the Benjamin Britten opera based on Henry James’ ghostly short story. The set up is, to an extent, familiar: a...
It’s Figaro’s wedding day – or is it? Poor, honest to the core, Figaro, is as a happy man, as any prospective groom would expect to be on his wedding day. That is, until he realises his master, Count Almaviva, to whom he is deeply loyal, holds...
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is one of the most unsettling ghost stories ever written. And Benjamin Britten’s operatic version as part of Opera North’s new season at The Lowry is equally chilling. When a governess agrees to take care...
British sitar player and composer, Jasdeep Singh Degun talks to Quays Life about his new sitar concerto, Arya, for the orchestra of Opera North, ahead of its premiere at the Royal Northern College of Music in March. “Arya is a Sanskrit word meaning...
Tim Albery’s critically acclaimed 2012 production of Handel’s Egyptian epic, Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) is just as thrilling in this latest revival from Opera North. Opera North’s production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare Heather Lowe as Sesto and...
Michael Barker-Caven’s able revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s 1993 production of La Bohème for Opera North, gives us a layered and richly rewarding take on Puccini’s classic tale of bohemian Paris. Lloyd’s transposition of this late Victorian tale to the...