Culture Whisper

Culture Whisper began its journey in January 2014, started by a close-knit group of London experts eager to simplify and share their insights on the city's cultural scene. Since that time, we have transformed into a vibrant community of over 50 members. Our team includes passionate individuals from editorial, marketing, design, and development, who collaborate with talented writers, artists, specialists, photographers, and curators.

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The Elixir of Love, English National Opera review

Nov 16, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

Donizetti's summer romance The Elixir of Love blossoms in the wartime England of Dad's Army (that is, a place where no one dies) in a gorgeous new production by Harry Fehr, making his English National Opera directing debut. Audiences and performers at Blackheath Halls Opera have already cottoned on to Fehr's cheerful and inventive talent, through his productions there, and indeed this Elixir is partly born out of one he did with Blackheath.
London's best Christmas music 2024 | Culture Whisper

Nov 12, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

Carols and seasonal favourites, Handel's Messiah and operas to raise the spirits
The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera review

Oct 12, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

The title says it all: the action of The Turn of the Screw, first a ghost story by Henry James, then an opera by Benjamin Britten, is a small, tightening twist. A new production of the opera by Isabella Bywater is more like a replacement machine than the adjustment of a small working part, but it comes with some gloriously persuasive singing.
The Tales of Hoffmann, Royal Opera House review

Oct 10, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

Bad luck runs in threes, and a poet's trio of disastrous love affairs is at the (broken) heart of Jacques Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann. The poet Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann pops up in the history of dance as the author of stories on which The Nutcracker and Coppelia are based. But it is his own, highly embellished, romances, one of which overlaps with the idea of Coppelia, that are set to music by the French composer who hoped for success beyond musical comedy.
Fidelio, Royal Opera House, review

Oct 9, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

When a new production of Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio, opened in 2020, Russia had not invaded Ukraine and Israel had not experienced the assaults of 7 October 2023 or retaliated. With the production's revival, the silent and detached observers in Act Two of war and political persecution take on a new significance. We are all guilty of standing by and doing nothing, in the face of suffering, suggests this unusual interpretation.
Trouble in Tahiti/A Quiet Place, Royal Opera House review

Oct 9, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

In the theatre, in 1956, John Osborne's searing Look Back in Anger, currently at the Almeida, took apart the home life of its central couple. In visual art, in the same year, pop art pioneer Richard Hamilton toyed with the explosion of stuff to buy, in his collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?
La Bohème, English National Opera review

Sep 26, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

How best to demonstrate the natural fit, idiotically and spitefully levered apart by the last government, between the company and its owner-occupier home, the Coliseum? Answer: with a tried and tested production of a big and hugely loved opera, brilliantly translated into English, that is visually delightful and believable, warmly sung and whizzily conducted.
Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera House review

Sep 24, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

Even against a sprawling political backdrop, the stories in Russian drama, poetry and prose are often microscopic family dramas, the ups and downs of people like us, albeit from a different time and place. In Tchaikovsky's opera Eugene Onegin, based on his countryman Alexander Pushkin's verse novel, it is the smallness of domestic life with young Tatyana that appalls haughty Onegin, when he rejects her innocent advances.
Acis and Galatea, Opera Holland Park review

Jul 20, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

Just over 200 years ago, his short pastoral opera Acis and Galatea was staged at the grand mansion that now houses North London Collegiate School, Edgware. So a new production by Opera Holland Park in the shell of Holland House, graced with an airy canopy, might not have come as a complete shock. And he would have counted himself very lucky if his orchestra had been the City of London Sinfonia, also stepping out in a new direction with a clean, unadorned 18th-century sound.
Il Segreto di Susanna/Pagliacci: Opera Holland Park review

Jul 17, 2024 | culturewhisper.com | Claudia Pritchard

In the theatre-set, domestic tragedy Pagliacci, this active presence is more pronounced than ever. Leoncavallo's one-act opera unfolds in the small-town hall where a group of travelling players are putting on a commedia dell'arte romp about a frisky wife and her lover. But off stage, the players' own personal lives are unravelling, as the husband roots out his wife's infidelity and exacts shocking revenge.