![]() ![]() "Berkeley's score is always engaging to the ear. It is impossible to do justice to such a complex, multi-layered work in a single notice, but Baa Baa Black Sheep is a real opera and one which I hope to return to." - Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times The worlds of stiff Victorian England and the India to which Punch longs to return are starkly differentiated: Auntirosa's austere regime, with frequent birchings, calls forth a dissonant, grey music, which the jungle vibrates with sumptuous colour. His finely tuned sense of instrumental colour is lushly exploited in music which evokes the sights and sounds of the jungle with marvellous use of woodwinds, tuned percussion, Indian-sounding instruments, and an electronic synthesiser. ![]() "No need for ifs and buts: Baa Baa Black Sheep is a hearteningly successful new opera, and Michael Berkeley surely the most engaging operatic talent to have emerged since Judith Weir.A major event, I think." - Rodney Milnes, The Times " Baa Baa Black Sheep proved to be a more substanial, sympathetic and redemptive piece than I'd imagined possible.the clash of East vs West feeds purposefully into the score, which turnes on two conflicting sound worlds.probably the most successful recent, smaller-scale contemporary opera." - Michael White, The Independent on Sunday He currently presents Radio 3's Private Passions, which won the Broadcasting Press Guild's Radio Programme of the Year Award in 1996, and is Chairman of the Governors of The Royal Ballet. For ten years from 1995 Michael was artistic director of the Cheltenham International Festival of Music. Most of Michael's significant orchestral work, much of his chamber music and his operas are available on CD as part of the Chandos Berkeley Edition. Since then Michael's music has been played all over the globe and by some of the world's finest musicians. In 1977 he was awarded the Guinness Prize for Composition two years later he was appointed Associate Composer to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He studied composition, singing, and piano at the Royal Academy of Music but it was not until his late twenties, when he went to study with Richard Rodney Bennett, that Berkeley began to concentrate exclusively on composing. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press So, for instance, the bully, Harry, becomes Mowgli's arch-enemy in the jungle, the tiger Sheer Khan.ĭavid Malouf has further endowed the child with the power to effect his own 'wild justice' - a power borne of the imagination which was itself the product of abuse and the need to escape it. Each of the other characters from one world has its counterpart in the other, and thus a comparison of human and animal behaviour is drawn. The opera marries up these two ideas using those elements of The Jungle Book that quite naturally seem to comment psychologically on the child's predicament. ![]() ![]() In Something of Myself, Kipling acknowledged that it was during this ordeal that he first thought about children living amongst animals. This childhood experience marked Kipling for life and explains a great deal of his later writing - the often terrifying elements of revenge, for example, and of course the escape offered by fantasy. In his short story, Kipling constantly referred to his new abode as the House of Desolation, and called himself Punch, and his sister Judy. It describes how, as young children, Kipling and his sister were brought to England from India and sent to live with a retired ship's Captain, his fanatical wife (Auntie Rosa) and their bully of a son, Harry.Īuntie Rosa took violently against Kipling and the boy was constantly beaten. This opera, to a text by a distinguished Australian novelist David Malouf, is based on the autobiographical short story by Rudyard Kipling. Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law. ![]()
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