The Prodigal Son & Passion, Poison & Petrifaction

L’enfant prodigue (The Prodigal Son) by Claude Debussy takes place at sunrise where a Mother laments the absence of her prodigal son, an outcast after leaving his home to pursue the world’s pleasures and realising there is ?no place like home’. Composer, Philip Hagemann has adapted the orchestration to chamber size and translated the French text into English. Passion, Poison and Petrifaction by Bernard Shaw is a comic mock melodrama that gleefully skewers the murderous mayhem and convoluted plot turns of Shakespearean drama. Hagemann’s music skilfully enhances Shaw’s wit with the opera’s resolution movingly presented with the lover’s motif.