The Importance of Being Earnest; Missa Solemnis: Royal Concertgebouw/Harnoncourt; Conlon Nancarrow: Impossible Brilliance; A Soldier and a Maker – review

Barbican; Purcell Room, LondonLady Bracknell is sung by a bass. Miss Prism is a Teutonophile composer as well as a sentimental novelist. Algernon and Jack duet sweetly to a splintered, expressionist-style "Auld Lang Syne". Cecily and Gwendolen converse through megaphones, throw at least 40 dinner plates and shoot each other. Apart from that, all achieved through musical suggestion rather than verbal perversion, Gerald Barry's operatic version of Wilde's 1895 farce The Importance of Being Earnest...

Read full article Share article