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A Little Bit of Magic
Purcell's 'The Fairy Queen',
reviewed by ROBERT HUGILL
When originally staged, The Fairy Queen was designed to combine three elements: a spoken adaptation of Shakespeare, music by Purcell and spectacular settings, in one rather long evening. Purcell's music is designed to run along-side the play text and is not a setting of it; in fact Purcell created a series of masques which fit into the play. Jonathan Kent's production for Glyndebourne showed that, with the right resources, this original combination can work brilliantly well. But such resources are not available to many opera companies and the resulting evening is rather too long for most ordinary operatic schedules...
Copyright © 10 October 2011
Robert Hugill,
London UK
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