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Showing posts from July, 2018

Isabeau - off the beaten path (just)

Among the major producing companies, very few beyond Opera Holland Park explore the repertoire of the late 19th or early 20th century and it is a period from which some quite astonishing music emerged. Anoraks will no doubt be able to produce a list of companies and productions who do dabble, but that won’t change the reality that we are just about the most regular producers of such ‘enjoyable tosh’ (as one esteemed critic calls them) possibly in Europe.  Since OHP was born in 1996 we have produced operas by Mascagni, Cilea, Giordano, Ponchielli, Montemezzi, Zandonai, Leoncavallo, Wolf-Ferrari, Menotti and Catalani. The common thread that joins most of these composers is that they were all part of a movement known as the  giovane scuola  (young school) and then in time, as the modern world took over, they came to represent what Allan Mallach called the Autumn of Italian opera; the last great flowering of Italian operatic invention and one that was looking northwards towards Wagne