All too often at performances of the opera you get that rather strained, knowing laughter that people produce when they feel it’s expected of them rather than when it is actually derived from the performance. There was a fair amount of it at WNO’s Beatrice and Benedict a few weeks ago.
But others in the family reported that Opera Project’s lightly-staged Barber of Seville at St. George’s Bristol was genuinely hilarious. They got to go because I couldn’t use the tickets I’d won at the quiz a few weeks ago. Musical standards were fine once the orchestra had settled down.
Meanwhile my daughter has alerted me to this on YouTube, which matches opera arias/extracts to Harry Potter characters, with clips from the films. I can’t always comment on the appropriateness of the extracts (composers included Boito and Meyerbeer and the music was not all familiar to me), but it occurred to me that the compiler would have had even more choice if they’d used Wagner (both draw on North European mythology) and/or Russian opera. Any ideas about an operatic Dumbledore?