DELIUS : VILLAGE ROMEO AND JULIET

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 29th of September 2013 at 3.03 - 5.10 pm

DELIUS: A Village Romeo & Juliet, an opera in six scenes
Manz.......................................... Quentin Hayes
Marti.......................................... Andrew Greenan
Sali............................................. John Bellemer
Vreli........................................... Jessica Muirhead
Dark Fiddler.............................. David Stout
Peasants..................................... Jamie Rock, Cozmin Sime,
               Eleanor Lyons, Angharad Morgan, Catia Moreso
Wheel of Fortune Woman......... Maria Miro
Gingerbread Girl........................ Iria Perestrelo
Cheap Jewellery Woman........... Mae Heydorn
Merry-go-round Man................. Owen Webb
Slim girl...................................... Hannah Sawle
Wild girl..................................... Kate Symonds Joy
Poor Horn player........................ Daniel Joy Wexford
Hunchback Doublebass player... Simon Robinson
Showman................................... Leonel Pinheiro
Shooting Gallery man................ Thomas Faulkner
Bargees...................................... Adam Gilbert, Patrick Hyland
Wexford Opera Chorus & Orch/Rory Macdonald  
(recorded in the Opera House, Wexford by Irish Radio)

 INTRODUCTION
APPRECIATION
VIDEO PREVIEW
REVIEW (!!!)
RECORDING 

If you want ecstasy of the love-death kind, it is abundantly available here, and this production of it delivers the goods. And it comes from Wexford in Ireland, because Covent Garden in England could not afford to put it on (it's the cuts you know, but this was the unkindest cut of all, and to an English composer, to be replaced by Verdi's La Traviata).
    My connection with it is this: I collect everything of Delius that comes my way, including all his six operas, and I have the Meredith Davies and Royal Philharmonic recording (2 big black discs from 1973, EMI through the World Record Club) with all the British singers of the time, and Noel Mangin of NZ as Marti, the father of Vreli or Vrenchen, the Juliet of the story. To my shame, I have not hunted down the Beecham or Mackerras recordings.
    The source of the tale had not come to my attention till I went to a literature conference  where one of my colleagues spoke about the Swiss German writer Gottfried Keller and his story about the people of Seldwyla; she did not mention Delius, but I gradually recognized that this is where he and his wife Jelka Rosen got the libretto for Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe.

A delicious Delius delight for delirious Delians.
29/9/13
http://operawonk.blogspot.co.nz/2013/09/delius-village-romeo-and-juliet.htm/ 
You know what to do: follow that blue line and walk to the Paradise Garden.
It will be a shortened day, remember, and I am already in the hour that will
be taken from my shortening life.
Sali is the Romeo and Vreli is the Julia in the Swiss village named
Seldwyla.

Brani