Winding up a yearlong celebration of Benjamin Britten’s centennial, L.A. Opera presents the composer’s most ambitious opera, Billy Budd, featuring definitive staging by Francesca Zambello from her 1995 Covent Garden production. It stars Liam Bonner in the lead role, and is conducted by the company’s own James Conlon, with performances Feb. 22 through March 16. When it was composed in 1951, Billy Budd was Britten’s most daring work, addressing homosexual themes that were taboo at the time. Today, such themes are less challenging than the production’s technical logistics, including a levitating stage that gives audiences a view of the action above
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- 2/21/2014
- by Jordan Riefe
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
In Britain’s naval heyday, a warship was a floating fragment of the empire — frail, distant, and solitary, yet tethered to the homeland by a thread of morals and laws. In this little world, full of sealed-in love and loathing, and populated solely by men, Benjamin Britten found the ideal vessel for an opera. And in Billy Budd, he found the ideal music for every moment of the seaman’s day. The rhythmic scraping of the deck, the heaving of ropes, the loading of guns, the ocean swells and bleak stillness of a windless day — it’s as if Britten had cast a spell on the physical world and turned it into a topography of sound.It’s difficult to describe the roundness of a specific sphere; it’s nearly as stymying to tease apart the seamless intensity of Michael Grandage’s Glyndebourne production, which is now in the midst...
- 2/10/2014
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
SciScreen All-Nighter | Britten centenary | More London free festival | Dark Side Of San Francisco
SciScreen All-Nighter, Newcastle upon Tyne
If you're the sort of cinemagoer who enjoys attending all-night film shows but has a nagging suspicion that your time could be better spent doing something useful – assisting scientific research, say – then help is at hand. As part of the British Science festival 2013, the Tyneside Cinema is hosting a high-calibre all-nighter during which attendees will be assessed between films to see how their bodies are responding to sleeplessness. Doctors from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University will conduct experiments in the Tyneside bar, while sleep expert Dr Kirstie Anderson will offer tips for the night ahead. You don't have to stay for the full 12 hours, but with movies including The Man With Two Brains, Christopher Nolan's back-to-front mind mess Memento and cult smash Re-Animator, why wouldn't you?
Tyneside Cinema, Sat
Britten centenary,...
SciScreen All-Nighter, Newcastle upon Tyne
If you're the sort of cinemagoer who enjoys attending all-night film shows but has a nagging suspicion that your time could be better spent doing something useful – assisting scientific research, say – then help is at hand. As part of the British Science festival 2013, the Tyneside Cinema is hosting a high-calibre all-nighter during which attendees will be assessed between films to see how their bodies are responding to sleeplessness. Doctors from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University will conduct experiments in the Tyneside bar, while sleep expert Dr Kirstie Anderson will offer tips for the night ahead. You don't have to stay for the full 12 hours, but with movies including The Man With Two Brains, Christopher Nolan's back-to-front mind mess Memento and cult smash Re-Animator, why wouldn't you?
Tyneside Cinema, Sat
Britten centenary,...
- 9/7/2013
- by Ryan Gilbey
- The Guardian - Film News
"Much good has been shown me and much evil, and the good has never been perfect. There is always some flaw in it, some defect, some imperfection in the divine image, some fault in the angelic song, some stammer in the divine speech. So that the Devil has something to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth." Those words are sung in the Prologue to Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd by Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, who in that far away summer of 1797 commanded the Indomitable. Vere's observation came to mind on the evening of October 20 as the Tokyo String Quartet played a concert at Sprague Hall as part of the Chamber Music Society at Yale's 2009-2010 season. Pace, Captain Vere, but to the extent that a concert of music...
- 10/24/2009
- by Ivan Katz
- Huffington Post
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