Challenging Performance, Chapter 22.4 : Music as social action
In performance one seeks to accomplish many things as well as moving and engaging listeners: these include creating benefits of various kinds, practical, social, financial, psychological, health-relat...
31 Dec 20242min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 22.5 : Assessing non-standard performances
In the much more varied performance culture envisaged here, evaluation of performance need be no harder than it has always been: performances are made to engage, to stimulate, to excite, to fascinate,...
31 Dec 20244min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 23.2 : How many Ave Marias?
Wondering how many different performances a classical musician could give of the same score, I asked friends and colleagues what they thought might be possible...
31 Dec 202429min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 23.3 : Further transgressive performances
An overview of the wide variety of creatively transgressive performances available on the Challenging Performance website, challengingperformance.com.
31 Dec 20248min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.1 : Reinterpreting opera
In current opera productions the stage and music directors work alongside each other using completely different and incompatible belief systems. As we’ve seen, there is no good reason not to reread th...
31 Dec 20245min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.2 : How we made ‘Dido & Belinda’
Ella Marchment (Helios Collective, director), Leo Geyer (conductor, composer) and I (as dramaturg) developed a reading of Purcell's 'Dido & Aeneas' score which made new, coherent sense of the text and...
31 Dec 20244min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 24.3 : ‘Dido & Belinda’ -- what the performers thought
The results of a questionnaire among the performers of 'Dido & Belinda' finds most happy with both the process and the outcome, some to their great surprise.
31 Dec 202411min
