Benjamin Wallfisch was born into an extraordinarily musical family. His father Raphael Wallfisch is a cellist of international repute and his grandmother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch would not be alive today had her cello not served as a refuge for her soul while she was an inmate at Auschwitz. Benjamin did not play the cello but instead … [Read More]
Edward Seckerson
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Classical music, Opera and Musical Theatre reviews, podcasts, live appearances, and more.
Benjamin Wallfisch talks to Edward Seckerson
Le nozze di Figaro, Glyndebourne Festival Opera (Review)
It’s the season of free love in Michael Grandage’s 1960s take on Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro – everybody’s at it; and since you can’t tell the men from the girls (or even the boys in Cherubino’s case) issues of sexual identity assume an added significance. The period would seem to be a reasonably good … [Read More]
Britten “War Requiem”, Bergen Festival (Review)
In Bergen’s Grieg Hall – one is tempted to say the Hall of the Mountain King – the 2013 Bergen Festival concludes with the mournful tolling of bells. A consonant “Amen” – like a healing benediction – is the last word and with it comes perhaps a glimmer of hope. But the mood is sombre … [Read More]
Briefly… Falstaff, Glyndebourne Festival Opera
It’s a world of girl guides, animatronic cats, and cabbages. Ford’s garden apparently yields nothing else. And whilst the flat surfaces and wonky perspectives of designer Ultz’ sets aren’t too prepossessing in themselves they serve the child in director Richard Jones accentuating an eccentricity in his production that is indubitably and forever English. There’s even … [Read More]
Anne Reid, Crazy Coqs
One of the great advantages of leaving your cabaret debut until you are on the cusp of becoming an octogenarian is that you and you alone alone make the rules. Better yet you owe no one an apology, least of all your audience. The embraceable Anne Reid positively bounced on for her set at the … [Read More]
Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne (Review)
The Major-Domo promises fireworks during the Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma, the director of Glyndebourne’s new staging, drops a bombshell – actually several bombshells. Glyndebourne’s wartime history – as a refuge for evacuees – would seem to have chimed with the darker implications of the opera within – namely … [Read More]
Liza on an E, Vaudeville Theatre (Review)
There are those who would argue that Liza (Minnelli, that is) has become so much of a self-parody that the best of her impersonators are actually more convincing than she is. That’s the cynical view, of course, but it is something that crossed my mind on more than a few occasions during Trevor Ashley’s barnstorming … [Read More]
“Wozzeck”, English National Opera, London Coliseum (Review)
If you should take your seats prematurely in the London Coliseum you’ll find yourself confronted with a group of serving British soldiers. You’ll shift a little uneasily under their gaze. There they are, staring, smoking, loitering; there we are, on a visit to the opera. There’s a disconnect. Among those soldiers is Wozzeck (Leigh Melrose), … [Read More]
Briefly… Alison Jiear at the St James Studio
You can take the girl out of Brisbane… Alison Jiear is a riot – a whole lot of woman with a blinder of a voice and the kind of familiarity that they breed in Oz. She and her audience know just how far they can take each other. At one point in her “Under the … [Read More]
Edward Seckerson chats to Lucy Schaufer
Lucy Schaufer has always been one to confound our expectations. As she puts it herself, she’s “an American in London, conceived within the American Dream and living in the Old World.” As an indication of her boundless versatility she’s been seen here in roles as diverse as Claire DeLoone in Bernstein’s On the Town, … [Read More]
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