Lohengrin Sounded ‘Silvery Blue’ at the Gran Teatre del Liceu

Thomas Mann, in one of the most famous cases of audio-visual synaesthesia, stated in a letter to visual artist Emil Pretorius that Lohengrin’s sound is ‘silvery blue’. It may be so. Josep Pons, the great triumph of the premiere night achieved Lohengrin’s beautiful silvery blue sound. Pons, the principal conductor at Liceu’s Orchestra since 2012, achieved with this Lohengrin one of the best performances of the orchestra in the last few seasons. The ensemble...

Giuseppe Verdi’s Il trovatore of 1853, with a libretto by Salvadore Cammarano and Leone Emanuele Bardare, is based on Antonio García Gutiérrez’s Spanish play El trovador of 1836. Set in fifteenth century Spain it tells of the noble lady Leonora who is in love with the troubadour Manrico, but is herself loved by the Count di Luna, a nobleman in the service of the Prince of Aragon. The Count’s younger brother Garzia supposedly died in infancy when a...

Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film Festen (The Celebration) is a black comedy in which the emphasis should arguably be on the word ‘black’ rather than ‘comedy’. Now, Mark-Anthony Turnage has adapted it into an opera, varying the original story in places. Set in 1989 in a hotel in the Danish countryside, run by Helge and Else Klingefeldt, it sees a gathering to celebrate Helge’s sixtieth birthday. Many friends and family members are in attendance...

Mary, Queen of Scots, a commission by Scottish Opera that premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1977, is the first of Thea Musgrave’s four operas on historical figures. It is also the first for which she wrote her own libretto, with her starting point being an unpublished play by Amalia Elguera, who had previously written the libretto for Musgrave’s 1973 opera The Voice of Ariadne.  While there have been plays and operas about the character before, the majority have...

Written in 1975 and first performed by Dame Janet Baker at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1976, Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra was his final vocal work. He assembled the libretto from parts of a translation by Robert Lowell of Jean Racine’s 1677 play Phèdre, and the cantata sees the eponymous woman contemplate her death as things have completely fallen apart with her husband Theseus. This is due to her lust for his son and her stepson Hippolytus, who has died as an indirect...

In 2020 director Joe Hill-Gibbins did not have much luck with his new staging of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro for English National Opera. Premiering on 14 March of that year, it was set to run until 20 April, but enjoyed no more than its first performance after COVID-19 saw all UK theatres close the following week and a formal lockdown declared on 23 March. What is technically therefore the production’s first revival at the Coliseum is in reality the first time it will...