The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz
The Malaysian Insider :: Showbiz |
| ‘Peter Grimes’ on beach is Britten 100 highlight Posted: 11 Sep 2012 07:03 AM PDT LONDON, Sept 11 — Benjamin Britten's searing opera "Peter Grimes" about a sadistic fisherman will be performed in June 2013 on the beach in the English coastal town that inspired it as part of a year-long centenary for the British composer who died in 1976. "We're going to put a stage on the beach and do it," Jonathan Reekie, chief executive of Aldeburgh Music, the music festival Britten founded and named for the east-coast town where the opera takes place, said today at the launch of the Britten 100 celebration. The festivities, promoted as "the widest ever celebration of a British composer", will include performances of Britten's works by orchestras, opera companies and conductors in 140 cities in 30 countries, plus a project to get 75,000 British schoolchildren to sing his music on "Friday Afternoons" all over the country, leading up to a big birthday bash on November 22. The Royal Mint is pitching in with the announcement that it will produce a new 50-pence coin depicting Britten, to go into circulation at the end of the year, and New York will have a year-long focus on his works, organisers said. There will be performances of Britten's pieces everywhere from Beijing to Moscow, which will see its first staging of the openly homosexual Britten's most overtly homosexual opera, "Death in Venice", based on Thomas Mann's novel. "The extraordinary scope of the plans announced today underlines Britten's truly global appeal and status as one of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century," Richard Jarman, director of the Britten-Pears Foundation, named for the composer and his companion, tenor Peter Pears, said. "He believed that music should be written to appeal directly to the listener and he wrote some of the most approachable music of the 20th century," Jarman, whose foundation will invest £6.5 million (RM31.9 million) in the centenary, added. As part of the celebration, cellist Matthew Barley will perform Britten's works in what are described as "unexpected places" across Britain, including not only concert halls and cathedrals but also shops, galleries, schools, cafes, heritage sites, woodlands and a rare performance in The Red House, where Britten and Pears lived and worked together in the close-knit Sussex fishing town of Aldeburgh. An undoubted highlight will be the performance of "Peter Grimes" on the beach in the town where, in the opera, the townsfolk turn against the obsessed, abusive and anti-social fisherman Grimes, who has lost two young apprentices in accidents, and force him to row out to sea in his fishing boat and drown himself. The opera, which had its premiere in 1945 at Sadler's Wells in London, was an instant hit and was performed in two dozen opera houses over the next three years, establishing Britten as a major force in 20th century music. "'Peter Grimes' is a rare example of an opera that is set in a real place that can be seen and readily identified today, so virtually all the settings of the opera are real places in the town of Aldeburgh. They exist today," Reekie said. "For anybody who's encountered the opera, it's impossible to stand on Aldeburgh beach and hear the sound of the shingle, the sound of the sea, the wheeling of seagulls and not connect it to the music." English tenor Alan Oke will sing the role of Grimes and Steuart Bedford, a Britten protege, will conduct the production in which local people, for whom Britten always had a lot of affection, will appear, Reekie said. He added that the opera would be mounted on a more elaborate stage than those used for rock concerts, but no "grandstand seating" would be provided for the audience. "If it rains, they'll get wet," he said. "But the opera includes a storm scene." — Reuters |
| Syria refugees drive Angelina Jolie to tears Posted: 11 Sep 2012 06:22 AM PDT  Jolie speaks at a news conference at Al Zaatri refugee camp with Guterres (left) and Jordan's Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh (not in picture). — Reuters pic The United Nations is in the process of registering more than 250,000 refugees from the 17-month-old conflict in four neighbouring countries, with more than 100,000 arriving in August alone — 85,000 of those in Jordan. On average around 2,000 Syrians arrive each day in Jordan and the country has already declared the influx beyond what it can deal with, and appealed for international help. "Little children who were asked what they saw described body parts separated, and burnt people being pulled apart like chicken," Jolie told reporters after a two-day visit to Jordan's Zaatari camp. "A little nine-year-old girl said that. "It's been a very heavy experience because often at times you come to these camps ... and rarely do you come and meet them as they cross the border and get to know people the moment they become a refugee," she said, stopping to compose herself. "They will say: 'As the months go on there will be no more of us, our homes are gone, our families are gone'."  Jolie listens to Foreign Minister Judeh at the news conference. — Reuters pic At Zaatari, 28,000 people live in searing late summer heat with limited facilities and choking, dust-filled winds. "The world is watching as though they mean to humiliate the Syrian people," said Musa Awadat, a father of six. "We feel we are in a big detention centre and zoo, fenced around where everyone comes to capitalise on our suffering. We didn't flee from Syria to come here to another prison." Appeals not met UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres, who toured the camp with Jolie and Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh, said their visit was a message to the world "to help us and the Jordanian government in order to massively invest in improving the living conditions of the refugees in this camp". Jolie travelled to Syria in 2007 and again in 2009 to meet Iraqi refugees with her partner, actor Brad Pitt. During one trip they met Assad and his wife Asma, who later told Vanity Fair magazine that the couples lunched in the capital. Jolie, dressed in a black T-shirt with her hair tied back, said that all appeals for international funding to tackling the refugee crisis had "not been met". Syrian opposition groups say more than 27,000 people have died in an uprising that has lasted more than 17 months and has descended into outright civil war in the pivotal Arab state. "The complexity of this crisis is one of the aspects that sets it apart, and the speed at which people have fled Syria," UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said in Geneva today. "With 100,000 having fled to neighbouring countries in the space of a single month, August, that makes it an extraordinary acceleration of this crisis," he told a news briefing. He said that almost 200,000 Syrians had crossed into Jordan, although not all were registered as refugees. In April, Jolie was promoted from serving as a UNHCR goodwill ambassador to a special envoy. — Reuters |
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