Adorable! Cecilia Bartoli in Händel’s Semele

My favourite singer in one of my favourite arias: from Händel’s Semele the aria Myself I shall adore. The earthling Semele has become the lover of Jupiter and now she imagines how the crown of Juno would suit her… Juno being the wife of Jupiter aaand the lady in black in this video luring Semele [...]

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The Copenhagen Ring is here!

Let me just show you this hoping it will persuade you to watch this wonderful staging of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen by Kasper Bech Holten and the Royal Danish Opera. A fabulous and modern rendition not diminishing the ‘epicness’ of the piece. Even this small collection of clips makes me wanna cry at least [...]

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The Science of Sleep

I just watched the nicest film: The Science of Sleep.

Young Stephane Miroux has trouble dividing sleep and dream from waking and real life. His dreams are extremely vivid and a source of creativity but they are also tyrannical in their control over Stephane’s life.When he moves to Paris he falls in love with his neighbour [...]

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After all – the show must go on

I have been watching Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece Fanny & Alexander. Having loved that film for years rewatching it just confirmed the magnificence of the beautiful pictures and the disturbing text.
The first part with Christmas in the home of the Ekdahls is like condenced Christmas – this is how it would be if all the real [...]

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Sinéad Cusack

One guilty pleasure of autumn is watching lots of BBC costume dramas while eating ginger biscuits and drinking Ceylon tea. In my ongoing and rather exhausting search for new material I happened to find an adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South in my hand when leaving a very large record shop in London a [...]

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Werther in Concert

My local library is really good when it comes to buying opera dvds. I often go there and leaf through the selection and find stuff I never knew I craved – but then there it is. Many I just pass visit after visit and then perhaps one day I decide to pick it up. One [...]

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Händel and Scholl News

I just saw three pieces of interesting news on the internet. At least they were new to me: Andreas Scholl has left Decca and signed with Harmonia Mundi; he has recorded a new album with Händel pieces; the Giulio Cesare of The Royal Danish Opera is to be released this spring.
The Händel album includes one [...]

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Les Contes d’Hoffmann staged by Robert Carsen

Les Contes d’Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach is one of my guilty pleasures and discovering that one of my favourite directors, Robert Carsen, had staged it made me run to the music library to pick up the dvd.
I say guilty pleasure since this opera is written by one of the big operetta composers and I as [...]

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