Mercadante's Virginia
With Susan Patterson, Stefano Antonucci, Paul Charles Clarke, Charles Castronovo, Andrew Foster-Williams, Mark Le Brocq and Katherine Manley; Geoffrey Mitchell Choir; London Philharmonic conducted by Maurizio Benini.
9 March 2010
Rossini's The Italian Girl in Algiers (highlights) features Barry Banks,
Jennifer Larmore,
Alastair Miles and Alan Opie.
MusicalCriticism.
com
'Following on from her acclaimed first recital disc for Chandos' Opera in English series, Brewer now offers an even greater mix of music in the second volume. Handel, Gluck and Mozart rub shoulders with Wagner, Beethoven and Korngold, while the Anglo-American repertoire is represented by Britten and Richard Rodgers, and the disc is completed by Menotti, Dvorák and Lehár.'
BBC Music Magazine 'Chandos have certainly fielded a handsome cast... (for) this generous selection of highlights sung here in David Parry's elegant translation.'
BBC Music Magazine
'... another classy Opera Rara release that puts us - and the long-neglected Mercadante - in its debt.'
Ricci's Corrado d'Altamura
The sixth opera in the Essential Opera Rara series with Dimitra Theodossiou, Dmitry Korchak and James Westman in the main roles, and the Philharmonia conducted by Roland Boer.
Donizetti's Parisina
with Carmen Giannattasio, José Bros, Dario Solari, Nicola Ulivieri and Ann Taylor with the Geoffrey Mitchell Choir and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Parry.
The Guardian
'Opera Rara are not about to exhaust the canon of their favourite composer, Donizetti. Even so, their regular revivals of his more obscure works do not often turn up something as good as Parisina, presented under David Parry's stylish baton in this concert performance... It was Donizetti's favourite among his operas. This performance showed why.'
Steven Parissien, shown on the right, joined Compton Verney as Director in January 2009 from The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment where he was Director of Education and Skills. Previous positions include Professor of Architectural History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth (2003-6); Director, Sotheby’s Institute (2001-3), and Assistant Director, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Yale University (1995-2001).

An architectural and cultural historian, he has lectured extensively and has written several books, most recently Assassinated (Quercus, 2008), and Interiors: The Western Home since 1700 (Laurence King, 2008).>
His book, Adam Style (Phaidon, 1992), won Apollo magazine’s Book of the Year for 1992 and the American Institute of Architects’ Book of the Year Choice for 1993.

Steven Parissien

‘I am delighted to have joined the team at Compton Verney while we are celebrating our fifth year. The gallery has come a long way since it opened in 2004. In that time, over 250,000 people have passed through our doors. It is my ambition for us to continue to grow and diversify. I am an architectural and cultural historian – with an avid interest in the architecture of Robert Adam. Being able to work in a building which Adam remodelled is a real pleasure, and I hope that I can share my enthusiasm with you over the coming months and years.’
The Compton Verney Collections are continually growing and changing. New acquisitions are shown on the right, comprising four for the Naples Collection:
Basile’s Self-Portrait
Preti’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas
Giaquinto’s The Last Supper
Giordano’s The Judgement of Solomon and
The Brazen Serpent.
and one for the Northern European collection, from the North Netherlandish School, Death Portrait of an Unknown Man.
The Chinese Collection was augmented by 5 new pieces in March 2009 and then in October 2009, 5 mirrors were bought. These are small hand mirrors, status symbols of the privileged classes, first produced in around 2000 BC, and ranging in size from 13.7 - 15.9 cms.

Dame Jessica Rawson, Professor of Art and Archeology at Oxford University, has illuminatingly re-arranged the display which also includes two incense burners dating from around 206 BC - AD 220 and three wine vessels dating from 1050 - 221 BC.

This fine collection has now been recognised as a collection of national importance.
Updated and reprinted as a paperback, John Lucas’s superb biography of Goodall has been newly published as The Genius of Valhalla, using the title of a successful event in November 2008 at The Coliseum to celebrate the great Wagnerian conductor, Reginald Goodall.

Following the Chandos Opera in English issue of the acclaimed 1968 BBC recording of Wagner’s Mastersingers conducted by Reginald Goodall, Peter Moores Foundation decided to produce this event, where it became obvious that the John Lucas biography was held in high regard, not least by the panel and the Chairman, Humphrey Burton, who ended the panel discussion by saying:

‘These are the last lines of this wonderful biography:

“He spent much of the time listening to tapes of the Bayreuth Ring on a pair of headphones he’d been given...” Annie Evans went down to see him just before he died and he said to her,
““I’d like to have one last go at The Ring dear. I never got bits of it right. It’s the work of a lifetime.”
That night while listening to Götterdämmerung he drifted into a coma and never came out of it.”

I commend the book to you.’
In March this year at The Royal Institution of Great Britain, The Opera Group revealed a new opera-in-development, The Lion’s Face, a work exploring dementia, specifically Alzheimer’s disease. Working in partnership with the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London, composer Elena Langer, librettist Glyn Maxwell and Artistic Director John Fulljames will create a work that describes the experiences of the patient, the carer and the research scientist. It is scheduled to tour in Spring/Summer 2010.

John Fulljames says
“Opera seems to be the ideal art-form in which to explore a retreat into an inner world in which the patient’s ability to communicate with the world diminishes. One of the aims of the project is to find ways of communicating the experience of being touched by the condition with a view to increasing public understanding.”
The Guardian
'It is an exquisite piece, full of beguiling sounds, and retains all that magic in this recording, with the original pair of soloists, Anu Komsi and Hilary Summers.'

The Gramophone
'Martin Crimp's concise text, made even more concise by Benjamin's omissions (shown in the admirably detailed booklet) shapes a version of the Pied Piper story to highlight contemporary anxieties about fragile political and social structures. But fragile is exactly what Benjamin's music is not. The drama's rituals are far from reassuring, and the music's eerie colours (comets, bassethorns, cimbalom) are the stuff of rat-infested nightmare. As always with Benjamin at his best, sonic refinement and formal lucidity lay the foundations for a uniquely involving musical experience... this unsettling piece exerts a vice-like grip. This is an outstanding release.'
The Daily Telegraph - Classical CD of the week

‘Independent Opera's stagings of The Sofa and The Departure were a highlight of the Sadler's Wells season in the autumn of 2007... This double bill, studio-recorded but with the same forces, stands up well on disc, both because Maconchy's dramatic instinct and musical invention were so acute and because the singing and playing are so good.

The Sofa is pacily conducted by Dominic Wheeler, the small orchestral ensemble relishing Maconchy's sharp ear for the way that timbre, rhythm and neat instrumental commentary can highlight theatrical situations. Lyrical melody, lively pastiche and contrapuntal cunning are seamlessly blended. A consistently first-rate young cast brilliantly interprets Maconchy's virtuoso vocal lines and enjoys the fun of Ursula Vaughan Williams's libretto.
Peter Moores Foundation has supported English Pocket Opera since 2002. Recently it merged with Children's Music Workshop to form Music Platform. Each year it produces a Big Opera Project and for 2009 it is Rossini’s Cinderella, which will involve over 11,000 children from 70 schools across London.

EPOC first staged Cinderella in 1993 when a 12 year old audience member, Olivia Ray was inspired to become an opera singer. She went on to develop a successful opera career and the work of EPOC comes full circle as Olivia takes on the role of Cinderella in this year’s production!
In the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2009, Sir Charles won Disc of the Year 2009 for his Mozart Symphonies 38 - 41 with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

The Gramophone
‘There is no need to argue the credentials of Sir Charles as a Mozart interpreter, so let us just say that it is every bit as good as you would expect... full of wisdom and leaving the listener in no doubt of the music's greatness'

PMF has worked with Sir Charles to produce thirteen recordings on the Chandos Opera in English label and one on Opera Rara.
Peter Moores Foundation has endowed a junior fellowship in Chinese archeology at Merton College, Oxford. It is planned that off-site work will take place at Compton Verney where there is a Chinese collection which has been recognised as a collection of national importance.

Professor Dame Jessica Rawson, DBE, DLitt, FBA, Warden of the College said,
‘An exciting innovation for Oxford and for Merton.’
In 2004 Peter Moores Foundation enabled the recording of Dove's Flight so that a wider audience could enjoy this new work. And that initiative has been continued: following the premiere in Paris of George Benjamin's Into the Little Hill, it funded the recording of the opera by Nimbus Records.
Peter Moores Foundation has supported The Opera Group regularly since 2006 when it produced Jonathan Dove’s The Enchanted Pig.

The Guardian
‘... this is a show that proves opera, at its best, is a source of magic and enchantment.’

Enchanting enough for the production to be transferred to the New Victory Theater in Times Square, New York:

The New York Times
‘Mr. Dove’s music deftly mixes tenderly lyrical flights, jaunty tunes, waltzing duets, song-and-dance numbers and elaborate ensembles... the music is skillfully written and personal. Mr. Dove does not play down to young listeners. The entire score is sung... The work is imaginatively orchestrated for a small ensemble, with striking and subtle touches for percussion, accordion and harp. Brad Cohen is the assured conductor. The director, John Fulljames, makes clever use of Dick Bird’s rotating set and stylized, sometimes sci-fi costumes. The opera wins you over.’

In February and March 2009, The Opera Group toured with George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill and Harrison Birtwistle's Down by the Greenwood Side. Into the Little Hill won the RPS 2009 award for Large-Scale Composition:
‘The jury was impressed by the sheer skill with which the composer has created a work of immense expressive power, inventiveness, drama and beauty, of a stature way beyond the sum of its physical and temporal parts. With Into the Little Hill George Benjamin has provided music theatre with a work for our time.’

The Daily Telegraph
'When I first heard George Benjamin's one-act opera Into the Little Hill two years ago, I tentatively suggested that it might be a masterpiece – not a word to be trifled with. A second hearing, in a superb performance by the Opera Group authoritatively conducted by the composer, confirms my judgment that this is something quite exceptional, both in the originality of its form and the depth of its inspiration.'
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Compton Verney has been re-hanging the British Portraits collection in order to make space for a collection of Georgian Portraits on loan from the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, which is part of The Museum Network, a partnership between a leading national museum, the Wallace Collection, and four important English regional collections: The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle; Compton Verney; Waddesdon Manor; and the Holburne.

Sir William Holburne was a sailor in the Royal Navy who retired to Bath at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. He assembled a remarkable collection of over 4,000 works which survives in the Museum virtually intact and is a unique example of a nineteenth-century townhouse collection. Portraiture in this age entered a golden age of realism and glamour. This exhibition includes paintings by such artists as Henry Raeburn, George Stubbs and Angelica Kauffmann, (her painting of Henrietta Laura Pulteney, from about 1777 is on the left) shows the radical changes in the genre during that time.
Thomas Adès conducted his opera The Tempest at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 2007, EMI Classics in association with BBC Radio 3 recorded it and Peter Moores Foundation supported the release of the recording in June 2009.

The Guardian

CD of the week

'Based on Shakespeare but reworked and condensed into three acts by librettist Meredith Oakes, the text is easily audible, with the sound balance slightly favouring the voices, but not detrimentally.

Many of the outstanding cast created their roles in the original 2004 staging, including baritone Simon Keenlyside as a noble, perplexed Prospero, tenor Ian Bostridge as the strange, wretched Caliban and Cyndia Sieden as Ariel, leaping to her stratospheric high notes with ethereal agility. Her set pieces, such as "Five fathoms deep/ Your father lies" and "He and your brother/ Stare and shudder" beautifully capture the character's supernatural, asexual nature. The flourishes and ornaments in the vocal writing have the feel of Monteverdi through a prism of modernity.'
Gramophone

'The Tempest will remain one of his most significant achievements... Adès's second opera succeeds where most Tempest adaptations have failed: in adding something to Shakespeare's magical and inherently lyrical scenario. From the tornado-like prelude to Ariel's stratospheric yet ethereal "Five fathoms deep" the music illuminates rather than merely illustrates the drama... it is one of the most viable and stageworthy of modern British operas. '
This exhibition, the scope of which will be a first for UK audiences, takes you ‘behind the scenes' to offer a fascinating insight into the world of the artist's studio in Britain. Through paintings, photographs, drawings, film, etchings, books and studio furniture, this exhibition will explore the changing function and depiction of the artist's studio from the 1700s to the present day.

Photographs will depict the studios of some of the most prominent artists of the 20th Century, including David Hockney, Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst and Lucian Freud. Francis Bacon's studio, photographed by Perry Ogden, is shown on the left.
The Guardian

A rare glimpse into the artist's studio

‘From the knee-deep litter of Francis Bacon to the artful order of Lucian Freud, a new exhibition explores how artists' workspaces reveal more than their occupants expect. Between them the beautiful boy huddled over a small fire in his icy garret, and the beautiful naked girl stooping in front of window overlooking a tumble of Parisian rooftops, combine almost every popular cliche about what artists get up to behind the closed doors of their studios... They hang among centuries of artists' studios captured in paint, film and photographs, in a unique exhibition opening this week at Compton Verney, the country mansion gallery in Warwickshire. Both show us wonderfully plausible lies: the viewer assumes immediately that the poverty and romance of one studio, the glamour and hint of exotic pleasures in the other, must relate to the artists' own lives. Which just proves how dangerous it is to take what artists say about themselves as the truth.’
View the newly published Reginald Goodall pages:
In February 2009 Elizabeth Maconchy's The Sofa and The Departure were recorded by Chandos with help from the Peter Moores Foundation.
Anne Ridler's text for The Departure triggers music shot through with anguish, tragedy and regret. The score is executed with aching poignancy and passion, showing how intuitively Maconchy could respond to the knotty problem of setting and heightening the English language. Maconchy's posthumous reputation was given a much broader base by Independent Opera's sympathetic, inspired treatment of these two stage works, and it is valuable to have this permanent record of the sensibility and insight they brought to them.’
Opera North’s production of Verdi’s Don Carlos in the Spring of 2009 was received extremely enthusiastically and recorded for the Opera in English series. The CD features Julian Gavin, Janice Watson, Alastair Miles, William Dazeley, Jane Dutton and John Tomlinson.
The Times
'(Richard Farnes) has already proven his Verdian credentials, but this is possibly his finest achievement yet: Verdi's questing search for humanity matched by playing of sometimes shockingly intimate tenderness. Distill the epic into the personal and you have the elusive essence of Verdi: both on stage and in the pit, this show is dripping with it.’