Enthusiastic Reviews: Lucia di Lammermoor – WHO
NEWS – Reviews: Lucia di Lammermoor – WHO
Recent performances in the British Summer Festival season have highlighted a new festival on the horizon. Winslow Hall Opera has put together a magnificent cast for this their 3rd year including the world class tenor and former Covent Garden Young Artist Pablo Bemsch, Romanian Baritone Vasile Chisiu and up and coming bel canto star Elena Xanthoudakis – “In the three principals, indeed, Winslow Hall had a cast which Opera North might envy” The Telegraph. Assembled was an interesting creative team consisting of Film and Television director David Penn, Conductor Oliver Gilmour, and award winning television and film costumer Dierdry Clancy. Sets by Sam Steer and lighting by the experienced Tony Shepherd. The streamlined and elegant production was well praised in the media and the public, receiving no less than 3 standing ovations for their 6 performances.
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Further images available in the Gallery HERE
Read Elena’s reviews below:
Elena Xanthoudakis … is a passionate actress, almost alarmingly identifying with the role. Giving an original account of the mad scene, she begins with hysterical mirth, which intrudes from time to time as she muses on her fate, always using her large and supple voice to intense expressive effect.
The Spectator – Michael Tanner – September 2014
The lyric Australian soprano Elena Xanthoudakis made an enchantingly fey Lucia… The quivering sensitivity of her opening aria contained the seeds of her subsequent murderous madness, tactfully enacted and imaginatively sung; the girl’s helpless dilemma was intensely felt. She must perform this role again soon.
4 stars The Telegraph – Rupert Christiansen – 8th Sept 2014
“Australian soprano is stunning in Lucia Di Lammermoor”
The star of the show, however, was Australian soprano Elena Xanthoudakis in the title role of Lucia. Lucia is a woman with so many men interfering in her business that she doesn’t know what to do with herself, and eventually descends into madness. Xanthoudakis’ acting is superb, bathed in blood red light from above. Her voice is clear and loud and she sings the opera’s celebrated mad scene with panache
Oxford Times – Stuart Macbeth – Thursday 25 September 2014
Simply clad in cream, Elena Xanthoudakis sympathetically conveyed Lucia’s highly-strung naivety. At her wedding she managed to hold herself icily together until the contract was signed; the subsequent Mad Scene, at such close quarters, was genuinely harrowing. Xanthoudakis’s clear lyric sound has striking immediacy, and her fluent coloratura grew naturally out of its musical and emotional context, with even the cadential top notes transformed into (truncated) exclamations of shock.
Opera Magazine – Yehuda Shapiro – (November 2014 issue, p. 1429)
View ‘Opera’ Magazine’s review below:
