|
The Daily Telegraph
'Few operas in recent decades have been instant hits with audience and critics, but Jonathan Dove's Flight, premièred at Glyndebourne by its touring arm in the autumn of 1998, is one of them.
This live recording derives from the soundtrack to Channel 4's transmission of the opera a year later. The theatricality of the performance is immeasurably enhanced by the presence of an audience, the recording picking up reactive laughs and, at the end, an audible sigh of regret that it has finished.
Flight's mixture of farce and pathos as a group of staff and passengers pass a life-changing night in a storm-bound airport terminal comes magically to life on this recording, with Christopher Robson's Refugee and Claron McFadden's coloratura Controller outstanding in what is very much an ensemble production. The LPO seems to enjoy getting to grips with Dove's exuberant orchestral writing, and David Parry paces the drama expertly.'
The Sunday Times
'Recorded live at Glyndebourne in 1999, Jonathon Dove and April de Angelis's brilliant comic opera about travellers stranded at an airport is as engaging on disc as it was in the theatre... one of the few successful comic operas of recent musical history.’
|
