Thinking with Opera

Aug 03 2023 7 ep. 58 mins 9
Thinking with Opera Podcast artwork

Explore the thrilling world of opera and its component parts in our series of podcasts, produced as part of the DARE partnership between Opera North and the University of Leeds.

  Arts  Music
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Thinking with Opera 08: Carmen, Carmencita!

Aug 03 2023 69 mins  
Who is Carmen? Is she really the exotic femme fatale of popular imagination, or is there more about her story that can be told? How could this be accomplished?In this special instalment of Thinking With Opera, recorded live at a seminar in the Howard Assembly Room at Opera North in February 2022, Professor Edward Venn looks at the many ways in which different operatic components co

Thinking with Opera 07: Paul Mason and Frank Finlay on Parsifal

Jun 23 2022 46 mins  
“What is the tension between this ugly ideology, the beauty of the music, and the agony of the man producing it?”The final podcast of our trilogy focusing on Wagner's epic last opera is a wide-ranging, unflinching discussion between the journalist, writer and filmmaker Paul Mason and Professor Frank Finlay of the University of Leeds.Paul traces the composer’s changing philoso

Thinking with Opera 06: Parsifal with Alex Ross and Dr. Áine Sheil

Jun 22 2022 50 mins  
In the second of three episodes focusing on Wagner's epic final opera, New Yorker critic and author of Wagnerism and The Rest is Noise Alex Ross and Dr. Áine Sheil of the University of York discuss gender, sexuality and ritual in Parsifal, and in Richard Wagner’s work as a whole.The multi-faceted character of Kundry – ‘Wandering Jew’, mother, seductress – is unpicked, an

Thinking with Opera 04: Simon Armitage and Gavin Bryars on Words and Music

Mar 10 2021 70 mins  
Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and composer Gavin Bryars consider what happens when their respective art forms are brought together. They discuss the pleasures and perils of crossing between the two disciplines, with excerpts from their work woven throughout, including tracks by Armitage’s post rock/ambient outfit LYR, and Bryars’ influential 1971 work Jesus’ Blood Never Faile

Thinking with Opera 03: Thomas Adès and Operas of Confinement

Jan 13 2021 50 mins  
How do music, plot, staging, action, dance and performance combine to produce meaning for an opera audience? Taking a close look at Thomas Adès's The Tempest, Professor Edward Venn of the University of Leeds and choreographer and director Aletta Collins – who choreographed the opera's premiere in 2004 – explore the conversation between different elements in opera. They also

Thinking with Opera 02: Carnivalesque

Jul 29 2020 63 mins  
From Monteverdi to Monty Python, cross-dressing, gross-out humour and a preoccupation with the grotesque seem to offer a release from the constrictions of moral codes and social conventions. Tenor Daniel Norman takes a trip into transgression in the company of Professor Alan O'Leary. Drawing on the theories of philosopher and critic Mikhail Bakhtin, they discuss “the licence to

Thinking with Opera 01: Performing Violence

Jul 16 2020 61 mins  
“In cinema you are a spectator; in opera you are present. I’m fascinated by the notion that we witness in opera: we have to endure.” Ranging from Ancient Greece to The Godfather, and focusing on the operas of Puccini and Verdi, renowned art historian Professor Griselda Pollock discusses how violence is represented in painting, sculpture, film and literature, how it is perfor