Stefan Pop - Recital at St George's Hall Liverpool - 25/06/2016

Following on from recitals earlier this year with Ekaterina Lekhina and Yunpeng Wang, Liverpool Opera Four Seasons introduced Liverpool to yet another former winner of the Placido Domingo Operalia competition, lyric tenor Stefan Pop.

Pop has appeared at many of the world’s greatest opera houses, from La Scala Milan to Deutsche Oper Berlin, and from Mikhailovsky St Petersburg to London’s Covent Garden.

In the intimate setting of St George’s Hall’s concert room he gave a recital featuring some of the most popular tenor arias including music from, among others, Verdi, Puccini and Rossini. Opening with Questa o quella from Rigoletto, it was immediately clear why comparisons are being made between Pop and Pavarotti. A powerful, bright, colourful tenor voice combined with a lively and hugely engaging stage presence immediately had the audience captivated. In the first half of the programme he also gave us Oronte’s act 2 aria from I Lombardi and took us to the interval with Che gelida manina from La Boheme.

Being a “Pop” concert it naturally came plus support, and we welcomed Barbara Ruzsics (who appeared with Lekhina earlier this year) and Andreas Z Magony. Ruzsics gave a delicately phrased Exultate Jubilate and Debussy’s Nuit d’etoiles, while Magony added concert arias as well as E lucevan le stelle from Tosca. His is a strong voice but his phrasing was at times a little awkward and he had some tendency to focus on projection over tuning.

After the interval the stage belonged to Stefan Pop, beginning with Rossini’s impossibly complicated tarantella, La Danza, which he navigated with thrilling flair. This was followed by the act 3 duet from La Traviata, where he was joined by Ruzsics.

After two more solos for Pop and Magony, the singers began to play musical games, turning solos into duets and duets into trios, with Pop and Magony sharing roles, and ending with two encores – the Brindisi from Traviata and a duet version of Nessun Dorma.

The evening was again beautifully accompanied at the piano by Kirsty Ligertwood who on this occasion also gave us an instrumental interlude in part 1, with a heartfelt solo performance of Debussy’s Clair de Lune.

Liverpool Opera Four Seasons will continue their series in the autumn and have promised us some surprises. Keep an eye on Good News for details of what’s coming up next.

Stefan Pop - Photo (C) Lucian Enasoni

Review originally written for Good News Liverpool

Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme - Liverpool Playhouse - 13/06/2016

Frank McGuinness’s play was first performed at Dublin’s Peacock Theatre in 1985 and won him the Most Promising Playwright award from the London Evening Standard – an accolade he has since richly lived up to.

This touring revival is co-produced by the Peacock’s sister the Abbey, with Headlong, Citizen’s Glasgow and Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, and coincides with the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.
This is indeed a piece very much about a group of soldiers heading toward the battlefield; about the men themselves and not the conflict that has driven them together. Eight members of the 36th Ulster Division slowly congregate in the barracks for the first time and begin to unfold their individual back-stories. The narrative is seen through the memory of Kenneth Pyper, whose older self opens with an extended monologue in which we find him haunted forever by the ghosts of his past in lifelong survivor-guilt. Slipping back to their first meeting, the work follows them as they discover each other’s fears and passions, learn to accept their differences and train to face the horror that awaits them.

This play makes an interesting bookend to The Night Watch, currently playing at Manchester’s Royal Exchange. In that 2nd World War drama, a predominantly female cast of characters discover that the pressures of conflict bring a new urgency to expressing their individuality. In Observe The Sons, an all male cast similarly discover an exaggerated need to forget the things that make them different and find some sort of camaraderie. Both plays explore aspects of characters that at once draw them together and force them apart.

Donal Gallery gives a fearless performance as young Pyper, an angry young man who’s hard to warm to with his defensive manner, but who can’t escape the affection of Enniskillen blacksmith David Craig, played by Ryan Donaldson.

McGuinness writes dialogue with tremendous power, and this is a work in which anger and reconciliation vie with each other in a simmering cocktail of emotions. The piece is slow to develop, and it’s only in the second act that one really begins to see the full extent of its genius. Jeremy Herrin directs with perhaps a little too much delicacy, but does achieve a great sense of the impending threat that looms ahead as we march toward the inevitable.

The fine cast are contained in a spare but atmospheric set from Ciaran Bagnall, on which Paul Keogan’s lighting paints some spectacular pictures.


Observe The Sons of Ulster Marching Toward the Somme runs at Liverpool Playhouse until Saturday 25th June, after which it continues touring throughout the UK and Ireland.

Production photograph (C) Johan Persson

Review originally written for Good News Liverpool

RLPO close their 2015/16 season - 09/06/2016

Last  week the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic brought their main concert season to a spectacular close in a concert given performances on Thursday and Friday nights.

Vasily Petrenko conducted an orchestra of over 100 players, beginning the evening with Skryabin’s exotic and opulent Poem of Ecstasy. This is sumptuous scoring for large forces and can often sprawl or feel overblown, but this performance was well controlled and the ebb and flow of emotion kept under a tight rein by Petrenko. Strikingly, every detail of the dense orchestral textures was clearly defined even in the most heavyweight passages, the massive climax at the close supported by the hall’s organ, felt rather than heard, just beneath the surface.

The emotional tension was relaxed when the orchestra were joined by Welsh harpist Katrin Finch, ending a brief residency with the Phil in a performance of the rarely heard Harp Concerto by Reinhold Gliere. The concerto has a cinematic romanticism, bringing to mind the scores of Korngold, and uses a surprisingly large orchestra to accompany an instrument like the harp. Finch’s playing, though, had the power to project through the orchestral sound whilst never losing its delicacy. The concerto’s central theme and variations movement in particular was a great showcase for her playing, which probably made converts of some of those listeners not generally keen on the harp.

The concert closed the season with Stravinsky’s epic Rite of Spring, one of the most notoriously groundbreaking works of the 20th century. We have heard Vasily conduct the Phil in this work a number of times, but never with this kind of power and electricity. Having got his reading of the score under their skin, the players added extra layers of raw, elemental urgency to their playing. Every detail of the writing was absolutely clear and in place, but the energy and tension in the performance was simply breathtaking, and well deserving of its standing ovation.

The stage was festooned with microphones, as the performance was being recorded for a Stravinsky project to include The Rite of Spring, Petrushka and The Firebird.

Whilst this concert brings the 2015/16 season to an end, the Phil will give more performances during the summer, starting on 18th June with a sold-out concert of the music of John Williams.

The 2016/17 season, which will be Vasily Petrenko’s 10th with the orchestra, begins on 15th September. Tickets are already on sale to subscribers and general booking opens on 4th July.

Review originally written for Good News Liverpool

The Government Inspector - Liverpool Everyman - 01/06/2016

David Harrower’s wonderfully irreverent adaptation of Gogol’s satirical farce was made in 2011 for the Young Vic and Warwick Arts Centre. Director Roxanna Silbert has brought it to the stage with breath-taking energy in this new coproduction from Birmingham Rep and Ramps on the Moon.

Pre-show music that could have come straight from the soundtrack of Grand Budapest Hotel helps to set the scene in the slightly tired lobby of a once opulent hotel, somewhere in a forgotten backwater of Russia. Ti Green’s set is a multi-level skeleton affair with staircases, the revolving door beloved of farce and a fully functional elevator, all as transparent as the duplicity of the play’s key characters.

David Carlyle plays the manic Mayor, thrown into a spin by the suggestion that a Government Inspector is coming to town, or may already be in their midst. When Robin Morrissey’s dapper but itinerant Khlestakov turns up he’s immediately taken for the inspector and soon learns to capitalise on the mistake, with the whole town falling at his feet.

Carlyle and Morrisey are joined in the central sextet by Kiruna Stamell and Francesca Mills, who give towering performances as the mayor’s wife and daughter, Anna and Maria. Both fall for Khlestakov in a big way and literally hurl themselves at him at times. Michael Keane brings wry wit to Khlestakov’s servant Osip, while Sophie Stone is hugely expressive as the postmaster with a rather too keen interest in the contents of the mail.

There is also a splendid double act from Stephen Collins and Rachel Denning as Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, a pair of local squires who propagate the idea that Khlestakov is the inspector. They display gleeful relish in the quick-fire delivery and the characters’ propensity to finish each other’s sentences.

Ramps on the Moon is a consortium of six major theatres and strategic partner Graeae Theatre Company, whose work in making theatre accessible to all is ramped up to a new level in this production. The cast of deaf, disabled and non-disabled performers seamlessly blend signing and audio description into the performance. This adds to the frenetic movement on stage but gives so many additional cues, along with surtitles and projected words and imagery, that the clarity of the storytelling is magnificent.

There is occasional shadowing of characters, in some cases a speaking actor will be followed about by another who is signing their words for them. Elsewhere Judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin, played wordlessly by a signing Jean St Clair, has her spoken dialogue delivered by Rebekah Hinds, who follows along behind. Meanwhile Amanda Wright, playing a police sergeant, has a head-mike which she uses to provide the live audio-description to users’ headsets from the stage, rather than as more usually done from the control booth.

This is high-energy, wonderful farce staged with boundless imagination. The Government Inspector plays at the Everyman, Hope Street until Saturday 11^th June and comes highly recommended.

David Carlisle and cast - photo (c) Robert Day

This review was originally written for Good News Liverpool

George Egg, Anarchist Cook - Unity Theatre Liverpool - 31/05/2016

If you’ve ever thought the iron in your hotel room smelled odd or found bottles of shampoo in the mini-bar, perhaps George Egg has been there before you.

George is a stand-up comedian who spends half his life on the road (just look at the list of dates on his website) and far too much time for his liking in hotel rooms. Being a lover of fine food too, he’s got pretty fed up with arriving back late after a gig to find that the only sources of food are the night porter with the room service menu or the late night supermarket. So it is that he’s devised countless ways to rustle up something tasty with what he can find in the hotel room and a few items picked up on the way back.

George’s love of good away-from-home cooking meets stand-up in his show “Anarchist Cook” which hit Liverpool’s Unity this week after returning from a stint in New Zealand via London and Norway.

Part comedy gig, part demonstration, it’s hard to pigeon-hole this show, which is a feast for all the senses. In the space of roughly 80 minutes he rustles up a three course meal using a selection of simple ingredients, rather a lot of those little UHT milks and some forage from the hotel lobby. All cooked with appliances such as the iron, the kettle and the mini-bar fridge, the results look and taste good, being presented to the audience to sample at the end of the show. From home made cheese (really) to poached sea bream and fluffy pancakes, everything is done pretty much to perfection.

Coming to the end of the evening you’re left wondering whether you just dreamed it or did he really just do that, whilst delivering some great observational humour. Not only does he demonstrate the three courses that he presents on stage, he also throws in numerous other recipe tips, including a method for curing homemade salami that boggles the mind. You can even buy recipe cards at the end.

I can’t say I’d recommend trying this in the next Premier Inn you stop in, unless you don’t mind a surcharge, or using your own iron at home like this but the recipes do adapt for preparation with more conventional equipment.

George isn’t the tidiest of cooks (there’s a dreadful mess on the floor) but he has impressive knife skills to go with his infectious sense of humour. Anarchist Cook is a cross between Saturday Kitchen and the Tommy Cooper Show, and well worth a visit if you find it hitting a venue near you.

This review was originally written for Good News Liverpool