Page 179 - FINAL_Theatre of Sound Coverage Book

The other top promise of the year, for me, came from 28-year-old lyric soprano Johanna Wallroth
in a stunning recital with brilliant pianist Magnus Svensson at a Birgit Nilsson Days recital near
the farm on the Bjäre peninsula in southwest Sweden where the great singer grew up: my only
trip to any overseas festival this year, via Copenhagen, one for which I’m profoundly grateful. In a
final gala Wallroth teamed up to sing Strauss's Sophie to former stipendium winner Emma
Sventelius's Octavan and masterclass star Miah Persson's Marschallin in plums from Der
Rosenkavalier.

It was with a profound sense of shock that we learned of that most remarkable opera director
Graham Vick’s untimely death from Covid complications in May. He’d inspired my students in a
three-hour Zoom session on Prokofiev’s War and Peace, and the last message I had was about
his plans for RhineGold with his beloved and always iconoclastic Birmingham Opera Company. It
happened after his passing, and with such high-level performances from all involved, not least
Brum-born conductor Alpesh Chauhan’s first Wagner with a full City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra, that the event turned into a celebration of all that had been achieved, and would
continue to be achieved, by this company with an uncrushable spirit of opera for all As Richard
Bratby, in his second choice, points out, "BOC's work has never seemed more urgent, or
more necessary". Pictured below by Andrew Fox: gods briefly triumphant, rainbow people
crushed.

A moving coda to the operatic year came in the shape of pocket Bartók, Bluebeard’s Castle,
reimagined as a heartbreaking drama of dementia in the unfamiliar surroundings of what used to
be the Limelight Club, now.Stone Nest. Of the two casts, or rather mixed casts, I saw Susan
Bullock’s astounding performance as a confused wife and Gerald Finley’s tender-frustrated
husband; Alexandra reinforces my sense of wonder at what they achieved. But I was glad to
catch another lead, Gweneth-Ann Jeffers, in a special collaboration with dementia
sufferers, Judith’s Castle, a work of great integrity by a young composer to watch, Electra