Classical and Jazz: Latest News > March 31
Published: 31 March, 2011
TWO new short operas by an intriguing group of composers and writers are being performed in the short OperaShots series at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Covent Garden, starting April 7.
A story of our times is being told by Monty Python member Terry Jones and film/TV music composer Anne Dudley. The Doctor’s Tale is a Pythonesque tale of a doctor whose devoted patients come to his rescue after he is forced to stop practising. Hopefully, we’ll get Terry Jones’s para doric, screechy-voiced depictions of “pepper-pots,” those middle-aged women so hilarious in Python sketches.
Second, Stewart Copeland, one-time drummer with the band The Police, has written the libretto and composed the music to go with Edgar Allan Poe’s gothic horror story, The Tell-Tale Heart. Although written more than 150 years ago, it’s another story of our time about an unnamed Narrator who insists on his sanity after murdering an old man with a “vulture eye”. The murderer dismembers and hides the body under the floorboards. Ultimately, the Narrator’s guilt manifests itself in the hallucination that the dead man’s heart is still beating under the floorboards.
Opera fans should note that public booking for the Royal Opera House summer season opens at 10am on Wednesday. There’s Tosca, opening on June 7, Peter Grimes on June 21, Madame Butterfly on June 25 and Mannet’s Cendrillion on July 5. You’ll have to be quick to get tickets for Tosca on July 14 and 17. That’s when Rumanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu and German tenor Jonas Kaufman will be singing Tosca and Cavaradossi. There’s a Tosca sing-a-long on June 20 that should be fun.