Opera Holland Park has opened the season with Puccini’s operatic blockbuster Tosca. At OHP the stage was transformed into a back alley in Rome. It was 1968, mid-election, and there was trouble on the streets. In the opening scene, the police laid into demonstrators, political prisoners hid out in the church, while police chief, Scarpia, issued…
Tag: Stephen Barlow
Vixen in the Park
Leoš Janáček’s Cunning Little Vixen is a popular work on the opera circuit. Man’s uneasy alliance with the natural world is a theme which chimes particularly well with our times. Janácek wrote it way back in 1921 however, and he spent many an hour studying forest animals (as did many other composers worth their salt before him). …