Seb Gillot | Andrew Benson-Wilson : Early Music Reviews +

Purcell, The Fairy Queen
HGO, HGOAntiqua Orchestra, Seb Gillot, Eloise Lally
Jacksons Lane Arts Centre, Highgate, 27 April 2024

Purcell’s ‘semi-opera’ is a complicated piece to perform and/or stage. Originally composed for a version of Shakespeare’s MIdsummer’s Nights Dream it includes incidental instrumental pieces (First and Second Music as the audience gathered, Act Tunes between acts, short symphonies at the start of each act and various dances) together with five staged masques at the end of each act. The whole thing lasts about 5 hours. I watched the bemused audience at Glyndebourne in 2009 as they sat through around 45 minutes of spoken text before the first masque. The music and text of the masques only bear a metaphorical relationship to the Shakespear tale. This impressive production by HGO (formally known as Hampstead Garden Opera) added an additional layer of interpretation by setting the whole thing as “a variety of incarnations by a magical tale-spinner, a photographer studying love through her camera lens”. They promised to take us “through the gamut of human emotions … as we are taken into the photographer’s dream space where anything is possible. In a brief spoken introduction, we were told that “mischiefs are at play”. Indeed they were.

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Rameau: Hippolyte et Aricie
Ensemble OrQuesta
Grimborn Opera Festival
Arcola Theatre, Dalston, London
13 August 2019

As the name of suggests, Grimeborn is not Glyndebourne. Its mid-summer season is based at the Arcola Theatre, a converted textile factory in Dalston, East London, and focuses on new operas and experimental productions of more established repertoire. The cramped space forces directors, singers and instrumentalists to rethink opera presentation. There is only space for very few instrumentalists in a tiny gallery which is only accessible by ladder. The singers are performing within a few feet of the audience, which sits on three sides of the small central stage area, creating directorial issues in how the singers relate to the audience. It is about as far as you can get from the ideal space to perform French Baroque opera, with its enormous casts of singers and dancers, large orchestral forces and elaborate stage settings, but that is exactly what Ensemble OrQuesta are doing in their production of Rameau’s tragédie en musique: Hippolyte et Aricie. Continue reading →