(this piece of news is from October 2022)
Opera, the world’s leading opera magazine, wrote a review of my and Rebecca Hurst’s opera Music and the Brain. I’m thrilled!
It was published shortly after the opera was performed at the Tête à Tête opera festival in the autumn of 2022 after a lovely tour to Iceland and Sweden (where I was also composer in residence at the Nordic Song Festival). Later the same year we also performed the work in Liverpool at the Tung Auditorium.
Highlight:
“The music, in a postmodern tonal idiom, is immediately coherent and engaging, and Thorgunnur Anna Ornolfsdottir and Gunnar Gudbjornsson, called upon to speak as well as sing, gave consummate performances.”
— Yehuda Shapiro, Opera magazine, November 2022.
The full review:
“Music and the brain, previously staged in Iceland and Sweden, is composed by Helgi R. Ingvarsson. It occupies similar territory as Michael Nyman’s 1986 opera The man who mistook his wife for a hat, in that the libretto, by Rebecca Hurst, is based on a case document by the neurologist Oliver Sacks. The two characters, accompanied by piano and flute, are a mezzo-soprano who has suffered trauma in an accident and her doctor. The music, in a postmodern tonal idiom, is immediately coherent and engaging, and Thorgunnur Anna Ornolfsdottir and Gunnar Gudbjornsson, called upon to speak as well as sing, gave consummate performances.”
— Yehuda Shapiro, Opera magazine, November 2022.
More information about the opera on my website: https://helgiingvarsson.com/musicandthebrain
MatB at the TaT festival: https://www.tete-a-tete.org.uk/event/music-and-the-brain-2/
MatB at the Tung Auditorium: https://thetungauditorium.com/events/music-and-the-brain
MatB at the Nordic Song Festival (Sweden) – where I was also composer in residence: https://www.nordicsongfestival.com/en/composer-of-the-year/
