Just in: ENO reopens Coliseum

Just in: ENO reopens Coliseum

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norman lebrecht

September 14, 2020

The first London opera stage to reopen during Covid will be English National Opera, which will perform Mozart’s Requiem at the Coliseum to socially distanced audiences on 6 and 7 November.

ENO Music Director Martyn Brabbins will conduct a reduced orchestra and chorus with soloists Elizabeth Llewellyn, Dame Sarah Connolly, Toby Spence and Brindley Sherratt.

Annilese Miskimmon, Artistic Director, ENO, said: ‘It is important to acknowledge the full impact of Covid-19, and the loss we have suffered as a country. Mozart’s Requiem is the perfect music to provide a moment of reflection for our audiences, for a collective moment of remembrance. It will be a moment of great happiness for ENO to welcome people back to the London Coliseum again.’

 

Comments

  • JSC says:

    Populist programming.
    Dumbing down.
    Not educating.

    Just how many perfomances will (not Mostly by Mozart) tis Requiem stand?

    Why is there no room for Mozart’s Litanies, Vespers and Masses. Not to mention the virtually unpolayed Stageworks and oratorios?

    • Ben S. says:

      They’re Liberals!

    • Marfisa says:

      Rehearsal time for less familiar works? Perhaps difficult just now. But I agree in principle.

    • Lunchtime O'Boulez says:

      They could ask yer man Turnage to write a wrong note piece!

    • Philip Bohm says:

      Get real JSC, for goodness sake. Can’t you just enjoy the fact that this place and institution has survived and is staging one of the finest pieces of music that Mozart ever produced?

    • Nijinsky says:

      That Requiem was finished by a student who had lost his teacher and a friend, that has nothing to do with what a “Requiem” is about!?

      And then someone thought they could finish it better, recently (in these times, not Suss), for not being able to hear the emotion from all of what the schools had taught him was better, and came to town trying to prove it….

      Not that there aren’t other works that bare being listened to as well, I’m just saying there might be a reason the Requiem is so popular…

      I’m glad you brought up that there are other works…

      One wouldn’t even know they exist…

      sigh

      Wanted something to listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3Stx65-dpw&fmt=22

      What’s happened to the world since?

    • Nijinsky says:

      Thanks JSC for bringing that up, I didn’t even know that the Litany KV 243 existed, I’ll listen to it, and the other stuff you mentioned to warm my soul.
      I do find it disturbing that people assume that anyone could assume a child or a young man could just pump those “miracles” out, and be taken for granted…

      As if how they “behave” should correlate with their calculations of how someone should have who did, especially when it’s not adding up and “should.”

      It’s kind of funny, I have an old Time Life set of Vinyls of mostly everything of Mozart grouped in different categories, one being Sacred Music. And it was laying neglected, my father said I could have it when he didn’t want his vinyls anymore. But to get my record player to work, what he also gave me, I had to put together a little magnetic nonsense from a fake Internet video about magnetic technology, but with that doohicky close to the turntable it completely stopped giving up. Even kind of changed pitch on occasion, as if it’s resonating with some vibration from the “void.”None of that done on purpose. Used to do that regularly (give out), now hasn’t for years. So. I might end up via alien technology in outer space where Nasa sent the Queen of the Night Aria on a Gold “vinyl.”

      WOOHOO!

      crazy enough…

    • Nijinsky says:

      Listening to KV 195, with the turntable, in “outer space” of course, with who’s up there; and to my utter delight, out comes blissful Ileana Cotrubas, with her ethereal transcendent smile, who I had no difficulty recognizing whatsoever; which could be a whole other discussion beyond whether you can recognize present day violinists…

    • Una says:

      It is a start with wonderful soloists, and it is not compulsory. Mozart Requiem dung by opera singers and not early music band or an amateur choral society will be terrific and sung with great passion and gratitude. Just like their St John Passion years ago. I’d certainly be there if I still lived in London and could get a ticket.

  • David Howell says:

    Brave start, good luck

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