Latest news with #TheFairyQueen
The Age
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘Radical creator' takes a ‘kaleidoscopic look at love' in Shakespeare-adjacent opera
'The scenarios that are presented in The Fairy Queen are a kind of kaleidoscopic look at love in every aspect,' she says. 'It's all about love and marriage, loss, sorrow, unrequited love – every possible angle. The universal experience of love.' Indeed, one of the opera's most affecting numbers begins with the line, 'If love's a sweet passion/why does it torment?' The libretto, thought to be by Thomas Betterton, is best described as Shakespeare-adjacent. No named characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream appear in it. Instead, we have personifications of the seasons, night and sleep, and fairies and green men. There's a comic scene for a rustic couple, Corydon and Mopsa, traditionally sung by bass and countertenor. 'What felt more interesting for me, for this production, was to allow The Fairy Queen to stand very much by itself,' Jones says. 'It's got a fantastic structure, it really works as a theatrical piece. Although it's a series of vignettes, they are structured together in a very clever way. Purcell was brilliant – he died when he was 36 – but he was such an interesting, curious, people-loving person. He was amazing.' British director Jones is known as an innovative theatre-maker who often incorporates video in her shows. Her recent production of Peter Grimes for Gothenburg Opera in Sweden was praised in The Observer for its devastating impact, and noted Jones as a 'radical creator who uses video to original effect'. She works with a team of designers and technicians at her creative studio, Lightmap. This is her first project with an Australian company, although in 2017 she brought her production of The Dark Mirror – a version of Schubert's Winterreise – with Ian Bostridge, to the Perth Festival. Pinchgut was lucky to secure Jones' services; last December she took up the newly created role of associate director of the Royal Opera. Jones has set this production of The Fairy Queen in a modern city that could be Sydney, with the action taking place across a 24-hour period. A wide video screen will reach across the back of the stage. 'The production will be very visual – there are lots of changes, lots of colour,' she says. 'The first production of The Fairy Queen almost bankrupted the theatre because they put everything in it. We can't do that but we can use the technology at our disposal to do something that's very visual. We've included dance and other elements of baroque theatre but we've just made it very contemporary.' Loading At the Royal Opera, Jones is charged with bringing in new commissions, new artists and new ways of addressing opera as an art form, working out of the Linbury Theatre. '[Opera] has been with us 300 years, it's not going away,' she says. 'It's an art form, not a medium. Media do tend to come and go – we may have something different to television in our domestic lives in the future. Whereas opera and painting and poetry and play-making, they are not the same. 'Companies have felt the squeeze but the work will live on and shift into something that is much more central to our cultural life. Sometimes when something is under threat you become more active in protecting it.' Purcell's music for The Fairy Queen was all but lost until its rediscovery in 1901. Growing interest in early music led to its revival. In 2003 the barely year-old Pinchgut Opera chose The Fairy Queen for its second production, after making its debut the previous year with Handel's Semele. Helyard says he has chosen to return to The Fairy Queen to show how far this small but musically rigorous company has come. 'Back then we weren't quite as stylistically confident with playing and singing this kind of music,' he says. 'This seemed like the perfect piece to go to the Ros Packer Theatre, our premiere there, and to revisit Purcell.' Back in the rehearsal room at the Drill Hall, the wedding party is in full swing. Mezzosoprano Anna Fraser rises from her seat, mock-drunkenly staggers to centre stage and begins to sing: 'Hark! How all things in one sound rejoice …' Almost on cue, rain starts to fall, like a thousand fairies drumming on the iron roof.
Sydney Morning Herald
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘Radical creator' takes a ‘kaleidoscopic look at love' in Shakespeare-adjacent opera
'The scenarios that are presented in The Fairy Queen are a kind of kaleidoscopic look at love in every aspect,' she says. 'It's all about love and marriage, loss, sorrow, unrequited love – every possible angle. The universal experience of love.' Indeed, one of the opera's most affecting numbers begins with the line, 'If love's a sweet passion/why does it torment?' The libretto, thought to be by Thomas Betterton, is best described as Shakespeare-adjacent. No named characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream appear in it. Instead, we have personifications of the seasons, night and sleep, and fairies and green men. There's a comic scene for a rustic couple, Corydon and Mopsa, traditionally sung by bass and countertenor. 'What felt more interesting for me, for this production, was to allow The Fairy Queen to stand very much by itself,' Jones says. 'It's got a fantastic structure, it really works as a theatrical piece. Although it's a series of vignettes, they are structured together in a very clever way. Purcell was brilliant – he died when he was 36 – but he was such an interesting, curious, people-loving person. He was amazing.' British director Jones is known as an innovative theatre-maker who often incorporates video in her shows. Her recent production of Peter Grimes for Gothenburg Opera in Sweden was praised in The Observer for its devastating impact, and noted Jones as a 'radical creator who uses video to original effect'. She works with a team of designers and technicians at her creative studio, Lightmap. This is her first project with an Australian company, although in 2017 she brought her production of The Dark Mirror – a version of Schubert's Winterreise – with Ian Bostridge, to the Perth Festival. Pinchgut was lucky to secure Jones' services; last December she took up the newly created role of associate director of the Royal Opera. Jones has set this production of The Fairy Queen in a modern city that could be Sydney, with the action taking place across a 24-hour period. A wide video screen will reach across the back of the stage. 'The production will be very visual – there are lots of changes, lots of colour,' she says. 'The first production of The Fairy Queen almost bankrupted the theatre because they put everything in it. We can't do that but we can use the technology at our disposal to do something that's very visual. We've included dance and other elements of baroque theatre but we've just made it very contemporary.' Loading At the Royal Opera, Jones is charged with bringing in new commissions, new artists and new ways of addressing opera as an art form, working out of the Linbury Theatre. '[Opera] has been with us 300 years, it's not going away,' she says. 'It's an art form, not a medium. Media do tend to come and go – we may have something different to television in our domestic lives in the future. Whereas opera and painting and poetry and play-making, they are not the same. 'Companies have felt the squeeze but the work will live on and shift into something that is much more central to our cultural life. Sometimes when something is under threat you become more active in protecting it.' Purcell's music for The Fairy Queen was all but lost until its rediscovery in 1901. Growing interest in early music led to its revival. In 2003 the barely year-old Pinchgut Opera chose The Fairy Queen for its second production, after making its debut the previous year with Handel's Semele. Helyard says he has chosen to return to The Fairy Queen to show how far this small but musically rigorous company has come. 'Back then we weren't quite as stylistically confident with playing and singing this kind of music,' he says. 'This seemed like the perfect piece to go to the Ros Packer Theatre, our premiere there, and to revisit Purcell.' Back in the rehearsal room at the Drill Hall, the wedding party is in full swing. Mezzosoprano Anna Fraser rises from her seat, mock-drunkenly staggers to centre stage and begins to sing: 'Hark! How all things in one sound rejoice …' Almost on cue, rain starts to fall, like a thousand fairies drumming on the iron roof.
Telegraph
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Purcell shaped classical music – here are the pieces that prove it
After the death of Henry Purcell in 1695, his friend the organist Henry Hall wrote a notable couplet: 'Sometimes a HERO in an Age appears/But scarce a PURCELL in a Thousand Years'. Unfortunately, the prediction turned into near-prophesy, as English music produced no-one to rival Purcell's genius, arguably until Elgar, 200 years later. Purcell died far too young at 36, but he had made his mark. His memorial in Westminster Abbey says that he has 'gone to that Blessed Place where only his Harmony can be exceeded', a stirring remembrance of a composer who changed the course of British music and continues to have a unique resonance for our time. Now, after a century of the early music revival, Purcell's stock as a reinventor of a truly British musical style has never been higher – but what does this have to tell us about his unique achievement? Take his dramatic music: no-one has written a lament of the depth and intensity of Dido's 'When I am laid in earth' from Dido and Aeneas, with its piercing cries of 'Remember me!'. No-one has written dance music of the exuberance and sophistication displayed in The Fairy Queen, with its bubbling rhythms and intoxicating energy. There are some very specific things which made Purcell a revolutionary in the English music of his era, but which also binds him securely to our own time. Here are some reasons he matters – and the music you should listen to. 1. Purcell was a musical magpie His style was cosmopolitan and outward-looking. Like all the best British composers, he drew inspiration from the melting-pot of styles around him. When you listen to the dazzling Passacaglia from King Arthur 'How happy the lover', its lilting triple time flow and endless variations over a repeated set of harmonies are clearly derived from the French passacaglias of Lully and his contemporaries. On the other hand, Purcell's trio sonatas reflect precisely the innovations of the Italian style that Corelli pioneered, with two violins contesting contrapuntally. Yet behind this is the English tradition of equal-voiced counterpoint that Purcell first explored in his chromatically adventurous Fantazias for viols, written when he was in his 20s: it's a distinctive, heady stylistic brew. Sonatas in 3 parts: Christopher Hogwood/Academy of Ancient Music 2. Purcell enjoyed rumbustious fun There was no condescending snobbish division for him between the intense spiritual language of his church anthems like the sublime 'Remember not Lord our offences', and the bawdy catches he wrote for coffee and ale-houses – in which the texts of these rounds become ever more salacious the more vocal parts are added and the texts can be heard combined. Listen: Remember O Lord our offences/Simon Preston/Christ Church Cathedral Choir Purcell in Court and Tavern: Mark Brown/Pro Cantione Antiqua 3. Purcell loved a good tune He set English words better than anyone (maybe until Arthur Sullivan), and his melodies have a natural flow that was sensed by Benjamin Britten, who arranged many of them to sing with his partner Peter Pears. In the 1940s, Michael Tippett heard the countertenor Alfred Deller sing 'Music for a while shall all your cares beguile' and said that 'in that moment, the centuries rolled back'. What could be more perfectly shaped than the melody of 'If love's a sweet passion'? Or the descriptive melisma of 'I attempt from love's sickness to fly….'? Purcell songs realised by Britten: Allan Clayton/Joseph Middleton 4. Purcell knew how to sell his wares He grew up in the shadow of Westminster Abbey where his family worked, and never moved from the area (sadly, none of the places he lived survive, nor can exact addresses be found, so he has no Blue Plaque). As a young boy he survived the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666; he trained and sang as choirboy until his voice broke, when he repaired instruments and grew in composing skills, becoming Organist at the Abbey. He was determined to advance his own cause; his contemporary Thomas Tudway said that 'he had the most commendable ambition of exceeding everyone of his own time', an aim in which we may say he totally succeeded. There were bumps along the way: he was censured for selling places in the organ loft for the Coronation of William and Mary, making the large sum of £500 which he had to repay to the authorities. He formed a friendly alliance with the publisher John Playford and his son Henry, who sold music at the Inner Temple, and Purcell's wife Frances continued to publish and circulate his music, especially his songs, after his all-too-early death. A Purcell Songbook: Emma Kirkby/Anthony Rooley/Christopher Hogwood 5. Purcell was a master of his craft From his earliest years in Westminster he would have practised music and studied it every day of his life. His expressiveness, whether in complex counterpoint or simple melody, came from a total mastery of the musical techniques he had available to him. Nowadays there seems to be a scepticism that the study of musical notation, and harmonic practice, are necessary to composers. Yes, we value improvisation and spontaneity, and they were vital to Purcell's style, but for him they were built on the foundation of impeccable learning and constant practice. When we read in a contemporary account that the air 'Tis nature's Voice' in his Ode Hail bright Cecilia was 'sung with incredible graces by Mr Purcell himself', we can be sure that the elaboration and freedom applied to his music was based on fundamental mastery of the language. 6. Purcell provides one model for future music education When Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write after the Second World War what was then rather patronisingly called a 'Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra', he chose a theme from Purcell's theatre music. It was a way of demonstrating, brilliantly, how it could be varied to show the character of all the different instruments of the orchestra, across strings, woodwind, brass, percussion and harp, building a tremendous fugue which is combined at the close with Purcell's melody – the piece is now more often known as the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell. It could be the starting point for new explorations of contemporary music scoring in a new generation. Britten/Purcell Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra: Andrew Davis BBC SO 7. Purcell inspired future generations Britten and Tippett venerated Purcell at a time when they wanted to cast aside the legacy of the 20 th -century English pastoral tradition, which had been caricatured as the 'English cowpat' school of music depicting 'a cow looking over a gate'. Instead, they reached much further back in English musical history and Purcell's imprint can be heard in much of their work. Purcell later entered the world of techno music and film: Wendy Carlos took the hypnotic march from the Funeral Music for Queen Mary (with its hypnotic drum beats that had actually been added by their 20 th -century editor Thurston Dart) and turned it into a powerful piece for Moog synthesiser. That turned up as the scary opening music to the score for Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange. One way or another, Purcell had achieved a place alongside the greats of Western music. Nicholas Kenyon, the Telegraph's Chief Opera Critic, gave the inaugural Purcell Lecture at the Stationers Hall, London this month
Sydney Morning Herald
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Win an exclusive opening night experience at The Fairy Queen*
To celebrate Pinchgut Opera's debut at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay, you have the chance to experience Purcell's The Fairy Queen in true VIP style. Renowned for its signature fusion of Baroque music and theatrical innovation, Pinchgut brings this spellbinding masterpiece to Sydney's premier theatrical stage, led by acclaimed UK director Netia Jones in her Australian debut. Known for her cutting-edge use of technology and projection, Jones will transform The Fairy Queen into a visually dynamic and immersive experience like no other. Enter now to win 1 of 3 exclusive opening night packages, valued at over $500, including: Two premium tickets to the opening night performance on June 7 Champagne at interval An autographed souvenir program Don't miss your chance to witness this spectacular new production of Purcell's masterpiece in a sumptuous, one-night-only experience! Enter by Tuesday, May 13 at 11:59pm AEDT to be in the running. Enter for your chance to win Competition Terms and Conditions
AU Financial Review
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- AU Financial Review
Win an exclusive opening night experience at The Fairy Queen*
To celebrate Pinchgut's Opera's debut at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, Walsh Bay, you have the chance to experience Purcell's The Fairy Queen in true VIP style.
