Rokia Traoré brings Malian magic to the Luckman

Music
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Though Rokia Traoré began her genre-, culture- and gender-bending incursion into the international music scene in the late 1990s, I didn’t encounter her until Peter Sellars’ 2006 New Crowned Hope Vienna festival, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth. Reconceiving the composer as a griot traveller between Paris and Mali’s capital of Bamako, Traoré’s glorious ...

‘The Magic Flute’ at English National Opera

Music · Reviews
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Opera lovers in London have any numbers of possibilities. We can go mammoth:  Aida in the Royal Albert Hall for an audience of 3500 with singers and orchestra miked to the max; or miniscule: the prizing-winning Opera Up Close at the Kings Head Theatre Pub in Islington for 110, its Prohibition-set Traviata currently running until ...