George Benjamin’s Lessons in Love and Violence has been nominated for a Grammy Award in the category Best Opera Recording.
I would like to congratulate my LILAV colleagues on the nomination and wish them all the best of luck for the results at the Award Ceremony next week (Monday 27th January)!
Well it’s been a very demanding and emotional six weeks here in Enschede for the Reisopera’s new production of L’Orfeo – putting all the various elements together for this quite audacious version of Monteverdi’s wonderful opera. Tonight is the dress rehearsal and we open the tour on Saturday, in the Wilmink Theatre. This show is a real labour of love and a totally collaborative project, incorporating contemporary movement (from both singers and dancers alike), an excellent vocal and dance cast, clear vision from Monique Wakemakers and choreographic wizardry from the force of nature that is Nanine Linning. To top it all, a groundbreaking moving art installation above the stage courtesy of Studio Drift, which aims to mirror the emotion of the human soul. There are photos and a mini-doc (below), there have been tears and there will doubtless be relief to get this beast of a show on the road! Huge congrats to all involved, especially my esteemed stage colleagues. It has been immense and we haven’t even started the run yet! The show will apparently be properly be videoed for a closed channel, so watch this space for more information about that…
“Tenor Samuel Boden sang as sweetly as the birds admired by his romantic interest Johanna”
Opera Now, January 2020
“As an opera critic with a certain orientation towards pre-modern times, I was excited to hear the young British tenor Samuel Boden in the role of the young and charming sailor Anthony Hope. Boden is one of today’s finest exponents of the wonderfully peculiar voice type, haute contre , a very bright tenor voice found mostly within French 18th-century opera. It was fun then to hear Boden sing in a 1979 musical with the greatest of course.”
NRK, 7 November 2019
“Well known haute-contre tenor Samuel Boden gives us a lesson in phrasing, with the usual elegance ..”
Forum Opera, 21 November 2019
“Samuel Boden’s tenor was gorgeously golden…★★★★”
Bachtrack, 24th August 2019
“Samuel Boden offers us a Jonathan, generous, loving. … The voice is agile, flexible and gives its full measure in the recitatives as in the following arias, “Sin not, O King” with the two bassoons, in particular.”
ForumOpera, 6 July 2019
“Samuel Boden gives Jonathan, the unhappy hero caught between his duty and his feelings, the appropriate disturbed delicacy, supported by his elegiac tenor voice.”
ConcertClassic.Com, 6 July 2019