Barry: The Importance of Being Earnest (complete opera)
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GERALD BARRY
Barry: The Importance of Being Earnest (complete opera)
Barbara Hannigan, Peter Tantsits, Joshua Bloom / Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, Thomas Adès
[ NMC / CD ]
Release Date: Saturday 1 November 2014
This item is currently out of stock. It may take 6 or more weeks to obtain from when you place your order as this is a specialist product.
This release was made possible thanks to the generosity of trusts, foundations and individuals who donated to our 2013 Opera Appeal, the other two releases being Judith Weir's The Vanishing Bridegroom and Harrison Birtwistle's Gawain.
The Importance of Being Earnest was jointly commissioned by the LA Philharmonic and the Barbican in London, and received its world premiere staging at Opéra national de Lorraine à Nancy in 2013.
Two further productions were staged the same year at the Royal Opera House Linbury Theatre, and on tour with NI Opera.
The Importance of Being Earnest received a 2013 RPS Award for Large-Scale Composition.
'The world now has something rare: a new genuinely comic opera and maybe the most inventive Oscar Wilde opera since Richard Strauss's Salome more than a century ago.'
The Los Angeles Times Gerald Barry's riotous opera brings out the savagery beneath the genteel Edwardian manners of Wilde's play: its score includes gunshots, whistling and speaking from the orchestral players, marching boots, and the smashing of 40 dinner plates, while its characters - among them Lady Bracknell sung by a bass and Cecily by a stratospheric soprano - shout at each other through gales, quote Schiller's Ode to Joy (in German) and make polite conversation through megaphones.
'It's all completely bonkers, but I went in grumping and came out grinning. What more can you ask?' The Telegraph
'It's impossible to resist Gerald Barry's riotous adaptation of Wilde's comic play, especially with these performers. By throwing everything in the air, with a dizzyingly sequence of musical styles, borrowings and invention, Barry captures and enhances the essence of this perfect farce to create an inspired opera.' (BBC Music Magazine Awards 2016 Finalist - Opera)
"In the Barbican, the sheer size of the hall seemed to dilute the impact of Barry's fabulously inventive score, with its machine-gun delivery of great swathes of text, ricocheting instrumental lines, and surreal references...On disc, all those can be enjoyed, the sheer virtuosity with which Barry puts it all together appreciated" (Guardian)
"Barry treats Wilde's words cavalierly, yet he presents an irresistible portrait of buttoned-up English stereotypes on the edge of madness, panic, rage and despair. Highlights are Alan Ewing's (bass) Lady Bracknell and Barbara Hannigan's Cecily." (Times)
"Barry magnifies the fizzing quality into a relentlessly high-wire act that has the audience relishing the stamina of the performers, here under the needle-sharp control of ringmaster-in-chief Thomas Ades." (Gramophone Editor's Choice Oct 2014)
