Professional soloists, each with an aria filling out their life story, enable Panufnik to write without technical boundaries. Big, catchy choruses keep the company alert and busy. I said I was doing fine thanks, and was she singing in Dalia? Singing and acting, came her emphatic and enthusiastic reply.) Patricia Kopatchinskaja metaphorically risks life and limb in every performance she gives. (In the ladies’ queue, a small girl asked me how I was doing. It takes a particular aptitude, and artistic selflessness, to create something for sundry talents, including very young children who are quickly bored. I anxiously watched the man next to me blow and sniff into his handkerchief, thinking I should aid him with a spare mask. Panufnik, with Duchen, also knows how to stir the mix into something sharp, embracing and affecting. Welsh National Opera’s Migrations, the work of many hands and composer Will Todd, is a current success. Jonathan Dove has triumphed, with The Palace in the Sky (2000), and others since. Benjamin Britten proved us wrong with Noye’s Fludde. The streamlined show is directed by Karen Gillingham and designed by Rhiannon Newman Brown and her team.įew composers know how to handle community opera, with its connotations of worthy and probably not very good. Garsington’s artistic director, Douglas Boyd, conducts. There is also, for good measure, an oud player (Rachel Beckles Willson) and a dog. The involvement, via video link, of the Al Farah choir of Damascus and the Amwaj choir of Bethlehem and Hebron, whose singing is part of the performance, further extends the work’s ambition. With 180 performers – local High Wycombe schoolchildren, adult amateurs, opera professionals and the Philharmonia Orchestra – Dalia has a capacious reach. Her skill at spin bowling boosts her confidence and provides solace in the face of catastrophe. Despite their love and support, she encounters prejudice, until discovering a passion for cricket. A Syrian girl, Dalia Khaled, her home and family shattered, is cared for by a family in Britain. Women playing “men’s” sport, in this case cricket, is one part of its double-headed subject matter. With music by Roxanna Panufnik and libretto by Jessica Duchen, this new community opera had a pertinence no one could have foreseen when the work was commissioned (following the same team’s success with Silver Birch in 2017). In every sense, the timing for last Sunday’s matinee, the last of three performances, was ideal. J ust as Garsington’s Dalia sounded its final note, the all-female RAF flypast set off from Brize Norton to spur on the Lionesses at Wembley (nearly swooping right over the opera festival’s Chilterns home on the journey east).
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