Interviews

WOS Radio: Glyndebourne\’s Fairy Queen & History

| London |

21 July 2009

Continuing with Whatsonstage.com’s coverage of this year’s 75th Anniversary Glyndebourne festival, Edward Seckerson presents a discussion featuring another one of this year’s key productions – Henry Purcell’s Midsummer Night’s Dream-inspired The Fairy Queen.

In our first of two features, Seckerson talks to the opera’s director Jonathan Kent, the conductor William Christie as well as the designer Paul Brown. The Fairy Queen opened on 20 June and runs until 8 August.

Glyndebourne: 75 Years of Photographic History

Sir George Christie is the son of John Christie, who was the founder and producer of the Glyndebourne opera festival that first started entertaining opera devotees 75 years ago.

Edward Seckerson was delighted to talk to Sir George about his glorious new photographic book Glyndebourne: A Visual History, which visually documents Glyndebourne’s glamorous history throughout the past seven and a half illustrious decades.

Writer and broadcaster Edward Seckerson is chief classical music and opera critic for the Independent. He wrote and presented the long-running BBC Radio 3 series Stage & Screen, in which he interviewed many of the most prominent writers and stars of musical theatre. He appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 4. On television, he has commentated a number of times at the Cardiff Singer of the World competition. He has published books on Mahler and the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, and has been on Gramophone Magazine’s review panel for many years. Seckerson presented the 2007 series of the Radio 4 music quiz Counterpoint. He has interviewed everyone from Leonard Bernstein to Liza Minelli; from Paul McCartney to Pavarotti: from Julie Andrews to Jessye Norman. For more info visit www.edwardseckerson.biz