English National Opera: Die Zauberflöte Review copy

My review of the English National Opera's production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Die Zauberflöte has been posted at: http://passionofopera.blogspot.com/2013/12/simple-comedy-mozarts-die-zauberflote.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Last Days in London (For Now!) (Pt. 3)

Image
My final weekend in London: it came a lot faster than I could have imagined. While I certainly was wishing I could stay in Vienna for a lot longer than I did simply because of the magic of being in Europe for the first time, the great travels I had from there, and the majesty of Vienna itself, four months was a good time for me to be away. It is actually one of my critiques of Lawrence's London Centre that, while mirroring Lawrence's 10 week trimester schedule makes sense, 2.5 months just isn't long enough to integrate into an abroad experience. I'm jealous of the one student who did two trimesters there!! Anyway, the beginning of my final weekend was at Kensington Gardens, which I toured around taking tons of pictures before heading into the museum in the Palace itself. While Kensington gardens basically had me already with the skeletal trees and the autumnal colors (even though it was December by this point), one of the things I particularly loved about it was
Read more

My Last Days in London (For Now!) (Pt. 1)

Image
My time in London quickly dwindled. Though I am thankful to have had the time I did and I had plenty of opportunity for theatre, opera, cultural/sightseeing excursions, and wonderful trips to other parts of Europe, 2.5 months is definitely just a brief sojourn, much more so than when I spent 4 months in Vienna. Still, I managed to cram a ton into my last couple weeks in London. I'm adding photos here and some comments about my activities just going down in order of the notes I took, since I knew it would be a while (about 1.5 months!) before I could get around to writing everything. I'm breaking the post up into three parts so as to cut load times and make it more manageable. One activity for my class British Life & Culture was to go to a football (soccer, for American readers) match. Ours was in the Championship League between QPR and Charlton Athletic. It was an exciting match and QPR won the day decisively, with offense that constantly kept the pressure on Charlto
Read more

My Last Days in London (For Now!) (Pt. 2)

Image
My next stop was the Natural History Museum. While the museum's exhibits are a mix of quality, I had two very important personal revelations there. The first was that I  love  dinosaurs. Like most little kids, perhaps little boys in particular, I was always intrigued by dinosaurs, the tyrannosaurus rex, newly discovered dinosaurs that might beat the T-Rex, scary sea dinosaurs, etc. The thing that I realized is that I am still just as fascinated by them. Part of the reason for this is that they make me feel like a child again, in awe of the power of a "kingdom" of animals that "ruled" the earth millions of years ago completely distinct from any trace of humanity (of course it later became humanity). Especially with such rarities as the first T-Rex bone ever found, it's just so great to walk through a museum and think, "Wow. This is simply amazing. I feel like I'm 5 and I'm free from all the cares in the world and I can just be amazed."
Read more