Client: Grange Park Opera Yellow News Source: The Daily Telegraph Date: 17/06/2020 Page: 27 Reach: 317817 Value: 33699.5200 A lockdown performance that puts rival companies to shame Opera sure that she will emerge a winner. Havisham’s mental state, the idiom is Last week, soprano Claire Booth and fercely angular and fragmented, with pianist Christopher Glynn gave a episodes of pastiche reminiscent of the Miss Havisham’s scoldingly intense performance of La style of Peter Maxwell Davies (who Voix Humaine, a monodrama by Jean coincidentally also composed a Wedding Night Cocteau set to music by Poulenc, in monodrama, Miss Donnithorne’s Grange Park Opera which a suicidal woman struggles over Maggot, based on the story of the the telephone to keep her faithless Australian woman who inspired lover from abandoning her. Dickens to create Miss Havisham). ★★★★★ This week, we have another It makes for challenging rather than By Rupert Christiansen monodrama for soprano and piano on easy listening, but the adventurous broadly the same theme: Miss will fnd it well worth sticking with – asf Kani, the formidable Havisham’s Wedding Night, based on and the performers at Grange Park Wfounder director of Grange the spectral character in Dickens’s interpret it with compelling intensity Park Opera, deserves a Great Expectations, with music by the in an imaginative staging directed by medal for showing her competitors contemporary American composer Ralph Bridle, adapted from the version what is creatively possible at this Dominick Argento (who died last year) seen at the Arcola Theatre’s stage of lockdown. Her summer and a text by John Olon-Scrymgeour. Grimeborn Festival last summer. festival may have been cancelled but, It lasts about half an hour and takes Here as then, Sarah Minns is the nothing daunted, she has place in the room in which Miss singer, with David Eaton her excellent commissioned a month of original Havisham was jilted: having smashed pianist: it’s hard to imagine anyone programming, including recitals by the clocks, blocked out the light and doing it better – singing and acting Bryn Terfel and Simon Keenlyside vowed never to remove her bridal with admirable security and recorded in their Welsh homes, as dress, she goes mad, obsessively confdence, Minns suggests both the well as opening her beautiful theatre reliving her anticipation of marital hopeful young woman and the in the grounds of West Horsley Place happiness and the traumatic receipt of embittered old crone, capturing all the in rural Surrey for a series of socially the letter from her fancé Compeyson character’s volatile emotions without distanced audience-less concerts and calling it all of. Finally, she fantasises excessive histrionics or distortion of performances of small-scale opera. what life would have been like had musical values. Apparently flmed in Others in her feld have rather their relationship fourished. one take on a fxed steadycam, this is a lazily been content to stream The piece is basically an extract haunting depiction of a woman on existing commercial videos and ask from an unsuccessful full-length opera the edge. for donations: Kani has been Miss Havisham’s Fire that Argento braver and more enterprising – and wrote as a vehicle for the great Streamed free at grangeparkopera.co.uk when this horror is over, I am soprano Beverly Sills: as befts Miss 1 Coverage is reproduced under license from the NLA, CLA or other copyright owner. No further +44 (0) 20 7264 4700 copying (including the printing of digital cuttings) digital reproductions or forwarding is permitted except under license from the NLA, http://www.nla.co.uk (for newspapers) CLA [email protected] http://www.cla.co.uk (for books and magazines) or other copyright body. www.kantar.com/media Client: Grange Park Opera Yellow News Source: The Daily Telegraph Date: 17/06/2020 Page: 27 Reach: 317817 Value: 33699.5200 Compelling intensity: soprano Sarah Minns plays Dickens’s jilted bride Miss Havisham RICHARD LEWISOHN RICHARD 2 Coverage is reproduced under license from the NLA, CLA or other copyright owner. No further +44 (0) 20 7264 4700 copying (including the printing of digital cuttings) digital reproductions or forwarding is permitted except under license from the NLA, http://www.nla.co.uk (for newspapers) CLA [email protected] http://www.cla.co.uk (for books and magazines) or other copyright body. www.kantar.com/media.