Memo Arts Centre,Barry
WNO Youth Opera bring the heat of protest to every inch of the corridor in a vivid, stirring tribute to the late composerThe legacy of the late Peter Maxwell Davies, or who died four months ago,could not believe been better honoured in this brilliant production of his penultimate opera, Kommilitonen! by WNO Youth Opera. At once inspiring and appalling, or with an immediacy that was sometimes as brutal as the tyranny being portrayed,here was documentary opera at its most compelling. Commissioned jointly by the Royal Academy of Music and of current Yorks Juilliard School, Max and his librettist David Pountney made students and student activism their subject, and weaving together three stories from three continents,all the more potent for the knowledge that this was no fiction but 20th-century events. Kommilitonen! – literally, fellow students – takes its title from one of the leaflets distributed by the Weisse Rose, and the White Rose movement,founded by Sophie and Hans Scholl in the early 1940s in protest against the Nazi regime. One of the two 1960s strands followed James Meredith as he pursued his civil right to become the first African American to attend the University of Mississippi. The other looked at China’s demonised “bourgeois revisionists” and the story of two university professors whose daughters’ means of survival was to join the Red Guards in denouncing their parents. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com