Quimper Hittys

Hooray for Herring Liberation

To continue with Constance’s Operatic weekend…Today we attended a live performance by Pacific Opera Victoria of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring. It was fantastic!!! While we  enjoy listening to CBC’s Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, and find that attending the live in HD presentations at the movie Theatre is lots of fun,  there just is NOTHING like going to a live performance!

We couldn’t help but be struck by the similarities between the plot in Albert Herring and yesterday’s Rigoletto – Albert is repressed and threatened by his mother, Gilda is repressed and threatened by her father… both young people escape parental control and have a fling.  There are differences of course – Rigoletto being a tragedy, Gilda is ruined and disgraced, and dies horribly as a result of love, betrayal, and the lust for revenge. Albert Herring is a comedy, so Albert’s fling consists in a night of drunken experimentation and the cutting of apron strings.  Interestingly, although the powerful anguish at the end of Rigoletto was moving, it was the threnody in the last act of Albert Herring, when the whole town thinks he is dead which caused Constance and me both to shed a tear.

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To view Constance’s other opera reviews go to this link