Encore: ‘Kommilitonen!’ – One Year On

“Kommilitonen! Kommilitoninnen!”,

It is hard to believe a year has passed since one of the best weeks I’ve ever had.

Kommilitonen! was something special. I think we all knew that from the very beginning. As soon as Polly Graham said the words ‘promenade’ and ‘site specific production’ in the same sentence, I was hooked. The concept was like all of my Christmases come at once; an opera in a venue with history and character, where the audience move around the theatre space to witness three highly emotive stories, all told simultaneously, and performed by a cast of young singers taking on multiple roles as both soloists and chorus members. It’s exactly the kind of theatre that I love to watch and that I enjoy making. Being involved in such a project, I felt and knew that I was one of the luckiest people on the planet (or, if that’s too grand a statement, at the very least in Wales).

Encore: ‘Lohengrin’, lighting, and a lot of love

Happy Valentine’s Day! Here at ‘Willetts On Opera’ I thought what better way to celebrate the power of love (no, not quite like Frankie) than by glancing back to three years ago when I was lucky to witness a particularly love-fuelled performance of Lohengrin. Sit back, press play on the Wedding March (dum dum d’-duuuhm), and prepare yourselves for a seriously adorable YouTube clip…

Encore: 9th October 2014 – ‘La finta giardiniera’, Glyndebourne Opera

La finta giardiniera
(Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart)
Glyndebourne Opera
Glyndebourne, East Sussex
9th October 2014

My first and, thus far, only visit to the revered ground of Glyndebourne came about in quite a spontaneous manner. Being a human who likes to ‘google the things they love’ (as some of my close friends put it), I had seen images of La finta giardiniera from Glyndebourne’s Festival Season and had been irrepressibly drawn to the style of their interpretation. I loved the idea of the eighteenth-century look tinged with a modern-twist, a pinch of Commedia dell’arte, and a splash of Gothic; I thought to myself, ‘if there’s any opera production I have absolutely no option but to see, then it should be this one’ (being the biggest Mozart fangirl was also an enormous bonus). I was intrigued, and sorely tempted to drop everything and see it. Unfortunately I live in Cardiff and, at the time, was just entering my final year of undergraduate study at the university; the opportunity to find the precious time to visit seemed very slim.