Category: 5. Entertainment

The BBC’s director general is facing questions over why he did not pull the live-stream footage of Bob Vylan after being informed during a visit to Glastonbury of the chants calling for the death of Israeli soldiers.

Tim Davie, who has led the BBC for nearly five years, was told of the chanting of “death, death to the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]” by Bob Vylan’s vocalist after it had been broadcast live on the BBC on Saturday afternoon.

He was at the festival in Somerset on a visit to meet presenters and production staff when he was told that the chanting had been aired.

“At that point he was clear it should not feature in any other Glastonbury coverage,” a BBC spokesperson said. The decision was taken that the footage of Bob Vylan would not be made available on the broadcaster’s on-demand service.

But the live stream of the West Holts stage where Bob Vylan performed continued to be aired for a number of hours after the incident, allowing anyone watching the broadcast live to rewind it.

The band put out a statement on Tuesday saying they were “not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group”. In an Instagram post they said: “Today a good many people would have you believe a punk band is the number one threat to world peace. Last week it was a Palestine pressure group, the week before that it was another band.

“We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people. We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine. A machine whose own soldiers were told to use unnecessary lethal force against innocent civilians waiting for aid. A machine that has destroyed much of Gaza.

“We, like those in the spotlight before us, are not the story. We are a distraction from the story and whatever sanctions we receive will be a distraction.”

The Irish rap trio Kneecap, including the member Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh, who appeared in court earlier this month charged with a terror offence, took to the stage directly after Bob Vylan and led chants of “Free Palestine”. Their performance was not livestreamed.

The BBC did not offer any explanation for the decision made after consultation with Davie.

The broadcaster has already issued an apology on behalf of its staff running the live operations for failing to pull away from the performance of Bob Vylan during the chanting, describing the scenes as “utterly unacceptable”.

A BBC spokesperson said: “The director general was informed of the incident after the performance and at that point he was clear it should not feature in any other Glastonbury coverage.”

Sir Ephraim Mirvis, the chief rabbi, said the incident was a “national shame”.

He wrote on X: “The airing of vile Jew-hatred at Glastonbury and the BBC’s belated and mishandled response, brings confidence in our national broadcaster’s ability to treat antisemitism seriously to a new low.

“It should trouble all decent people that now, one need only couch their outright incitement to violence and hatred as edgy political commentary, for ordinary people to not only fail to see it for what it is, but also to cheer it, chant it and celebrate it. Toxic Jew-hatred is a threat to our entire society.”

Avon and Somerset police said on Monday they had launched an investigation into both performances after reviewing video footage and audio recordings. A senior detective has been appointed to lead the investigation.

A police spokesperson said: “This has been recorded as a public order incident at this time while our inquiries are at an early stage.

“The investigation will be evidence-led and will closely consider all appropriate legislation, including relating to hate crimes.”

Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, said he had been shocked by the behaviour of some at the festival.

He told BBC Radio 4’s Today: “There are some lessons, I think, for broadcasters from this, but let’s also not shy away from the issue, which is people in a crowd glorifying violence.

“I don’t think it’s something we’d associate with any music festival, but it’s a wider societal problem.

“It’s possible, I think, to be completely concerned by the scenes in Gaza and not stray into the kind of behaviour and endorsement that we saw with that performance.

“And I’m deeply shocked to be honest, that people would even not realise what I think they’re participating in when they do that.”

Writing on Instagram, Pascal Robinson-Foster, who performs under the name Bob Vylan, wrote: “Teaching our children to speak up for the change they want and need is the only way that we make this world a better place …

“Let us display to them loudly and visibly the right thing to when we want and need change. Let them see us marching in the streets, campaigning on ground level, organising online and shouting about it on any and every stage that we are offered.”

The band is due to perform on 5 and 6 July at Victoria Warehouse in Manchester. The Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester & Region has urged the venue to call off the show.

A Greater Manchester police spokesperson said: “We are aware that Bob Vylan will be performing in Manchester at the weekend.

“Greater Manchester is famous for promoting music of all genres and we welcome all artists to our region. However, we will act immediately on any reports of commentary or actions that could be breaking the law.”

Meg Waite Clayton was mulling how to follow up her best-selling 2021 historical fiction novel “The Postmistress of Paris” when fate tapped her on the shoulder.

Her father had died and grief was making writing difficult. Then came the global pandemic, which found the California author hunkered down in the new home she shared with her husband Mac in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, a picture-book hamlet snuggled up against a crescent-shaped Pacific beach.

And so was born “Typewriter Beach” (out now from HarperCollins), a novel about blacklisted screenwriter Léon Chazan, who goes by Leo, and his journey toward the embrace of family that was denied him by the Holocaust. The tale toggles between Los Angeles during the 1950s McCarthy era, and 2018, when Chazan’s granddaughter Gemma decamps to his old Carmel cottage to meet her own personal and professional destiny.

“Leo just came to me, that’s my father’s middle name, and Gemma is basically Meg backwards,” says Clayton. “It’s not my family’s story per se; my father was a tech executive, not a blacklisted writer. But it all comes from the shreds of my heart.”

Clayton is no stranger to populating novels with real events and even historical figures, and she’s particularly fond of slicing off gritty periods from the mid-20th century.

In “The Race for Paris” (2015), she crafted a tale spotlighting women war correspondents who helped chronicle D-Day, while in “Last Train to London” (2019) she based her heroine on a real Dutch woman who was integral to the fabled Kindertransport that saved many Jewish children during World War II.

In “Typewriter Beach,” we’re in another difficult period where Senator Joseph McCarthy is on a witch hunt to ruin the lives of anyone even remotely suspected of being connected to the Communist party. Often evidence was thin or fabricated, but that didn’t stop McCarthy and others from sending many Hollywood actors and writers into exile. Screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo had to submit scripts through proxies, often accepting only a fraction of their regular pay.

That dilemma is at the core of “Typewriter Beach,” which also features an appearance by none other than Alfred Hitchcock, who invites Clayton’s ’50s actress character, Isabella Giori, to audition for him. There are other well-known name drops, involving real Oscar night dramas and #MeToo movement trials, all of which bubbled to the fore during the author’s pandemic writing blitz.

“I write best when I write about the things I’m passionate about. And beyond being interested in the impact of the blacklist, I’d been writing opinion pieces for some time about the treatment of women in Hollywood,” she says.

How women are treated in Hollywood is a big focus on the novel ‘Typewriter Beach’

In this new novel, Giori is an up-and-coming actress whose life is upended by the scrutiny and demands of a publicity machine that doesn’t allow actors to simply be themselves. On the run, she leaves Los Angeles for Carmel. Clayton says she mined those details from reading about real legends from Grace Kelly to Marilyn Monroe, whose careers were subject to intense scrutiny and control.

Ingrid Berman was virtually blackballed after her scandalous extramarital affair with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, a marriage that would later produce actress Isabella Rossellini. She stayed away from the Oscars in 1957 despite winning for “Anastasia.”

For Clayton, the power of fiction over news reports is rooted in the heart. “History you read about, but with historical fiction you try and make people feel what it might be like to have something powerful happen to you,” she says.

Part of what keeps “Typewriter Beach” clicking along are the overlapping references to Hollywood then and now, especially when a guest appearance is made by the murder-mystery icon best known simply as “Hitch.”

To make sure his presence was genuine, Clayton watched countless hours of Hitchcock interviews and “made sure I watched many of his greatest works, which frankly was a great excuse to watch movies during the daytime,” she says.

As for the accuracy of Hitch’s comments and behavior in her novel, Clayton says that while creative license is fair game after someone dies, “I still felt compelled to make sure that things resonated, whether it was his love of eating many steaks at a time or his relationship with his wife, Alma, or the description of the house they had just north of Carmel. It’s all the way it was.”

In writing the new book, Clayton also got to know her new hometown better, strolling its tree-dotted and canopied streets, discovering its hidden beaches and learning about its famous poet Robinson Jeffers. She even dove into 1950s town gossip by perusing the archives of the local paper, the improbably named Carmel Pine Cone.

Searching old copies, she’d stumble upon articles announcing that Bing Crosby had just arrived for the season, see ads for movies playing at the local theater and scan announcements detailing which resident had just gotten a telephone. It all made it that much easier to make Carmel-by-the-Sea a key protagonist in her latest work.

“It’s this tiny town known the world over for its cottages and fog and famous residents like Clint Eastwood, Doris Day and now even Brad Pitt,” she says. “But the gift I personally got from the pandemic was being able to focus on where I now lived. And that was just wonderful.”

Apple Corps, the Beatles‘ media corporation, has named Tom Greene as its new CEO, the announced Tuesday morning.

Greene is best-known for his work with the Harry Potter franchise, where he worked first as an executive both at Pottermore Publishing, then as the CFO and later general manager at Wizarding World Digital, the joint venture between Warner Media and Pottermore. Greene is currently the chief operating officer of esports programming company Blast, and he is still on the board at Pottermore.

“We are thrilled to welcome Tom Greene as CEO,” Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Sean Ono Lennon said in a joint statement. “We have a lot of exciting plans and Tom’s experience and vision make him the perfect person to join us in making it all happen.”

Greene’s appointment comes months after previous CEO Jeff Jones, who served as Apple Corps’ top executive for 17 years, stepped down from his post last October, per Billboard. The Beatles had first established Apple Corps back in 1968, and Greene will serve as the third CEO in the company’s history, per the company.

Apple Corps remains active in overseeing the Fab Four’s musical legacy, giving the signoff for Sam Mendes’ biopics on all four of the Beatles. Those films will star Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and they’re expected to release in 2028.

“It is a huge honour to lead Apple Corps into this new phase of its history,” Greene said in a statement. “Like so many people around the world, I grew up in a household obsessed with The Beatles and their music. At a time when the world might need more of The Beatles’ spirit, there are so many new and innovative ways to bring their unique magic to all generations of fans. I cannot wait to get started.”

Apple Corps has appointed Tom Greene as chief executive officer, effective September 2025. 

Since 1968, Apple Corps has overseen The Beatles’ creative and business interests. 

“Only the third CEO in Apple Corps’ storied history, British executive Tom Greene’s experience and vision perfectly position him to continue that legacy, whilst expanding The Beatles’ creative horizons,” said a statement.

Greene has previously fulfilled operating roles for the Harry Potter franchise, including stints running both Pottermore Publishing and Wizarding World Digital, a joint venture between Warner Bros and Pottermore. 

At the time he left Wizarding World Digital, the Harry Potter Fan Club had grown to over 50 million members, supported by immersive digital experiences, daily content publishing and an innovative ecommerce offering. He remains on the board of Pottermore. 

Greene is currently the COO of Blast, an entertainment company working with video game developers and publishers on the production, commercialisation and audience growth of their esports programmes. It has grown twenty-fold during his time at the company, opening offices in London, Copenhagen, Berlin, New York and Mumbai. He will remain on the board of Blast. 

In a joint statement, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Olivia Harrison and Sean Ono Lennon said: “We are thrilled to welcome Tom Greene as CEO. We have a lot of exciting plans and Tom’s experience and vision make him the perfect person to join us in making it all happen.”

It is a huge honour to lead Apple Corps into this new phase of its history

Tom Greene

Tom Greene said: “It is a huge honour to lead Apple Corps into this new phase of its history. Like so many people around the world, I grew up in a household obsessed with The Beatles and their music. At a time when the world might need more of The Beatles’ spirit, there are so many new and innovative ways to bring their unique magic to all generations of fans. I cannot wait to get started.”

With 32.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify, The Beatles’ enduring catalogue (released via Universal Music’s catalogue division) remains hugely popular across multiple generations.

Apple Corps’ music initiatives include Special Edition releases for several Beatles albums, including Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles (White Album), Abbey Road, Let It Be and Revolver. 

The Beatles’ 2023 international hit single Now And Then reached No,1 in the UK singles charts. It secured a Grammy win and a BRIT Award nomination. 

Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series Get Back won five awards in the Emmys’ documentary categories.

Last year, Apple Corps and Disney+ released David Tedeschi and Martin Scorsese’s new Beatles ’64 documentary, as well as a restored version of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be. 

A four-film Beatles cinematic event is set for release in April 2028 through Sony Pictures Entertainment and Neal Street Productions. 

Directed by Sam Mendes, written by Jez Butterworth, Jack Thorne and Peter Straughan, and starring Harris Dickinson (John Lennon), Barry Keoghan (Ringo Starr), Paul Mescal (Paul McCartney) and Joseph Quinn (George Harrison), the project marks the first time Apple Corps and The Beatles have granted full life story and music rights for scripted film.

 

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ISLAMABAD – The British Council supported a vibrant collaboration between the Faiz Foundation Trust (Pakistan) and the Bradford Literature Festival (UK) to co-curate a special Faiz Festival programme as part of the BLF 2025 edition.

The partnership brought the spirit and legacy of the celebrated Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz to UK audiences, in a festival renowned for championing diverse voices and narratives. As part of this collaboration, three bespoke sessions honoured Faiz’s life, work, and enduring relevance, showcasing his literary influence across poetry, music, and visual arts.

James Hampson, Country Director of the British Council Pakistan, said: “We’re proud to provide an opportunity for people to hear more about Faiz Ahmed Faiz. New collaborations, building on old connections between the UK and Pakistan, will showcase our shared cultural heritage. Introducing established and new talent from Pakistan to British audiences is important to us, and we’re pleased to be supporting Bradford 2025 – UK City of Culture.”

Moneeza Hashmi, Media Expert and Faiz Foundation Trustee, said: “My father, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, has always been a poet beyond borders, speaking to the hearts of people across cultures and nations. Now, through the Faiz Foundation, we’re taking his legacy across the world, sharing his poetry and ideals with broader audiences. It’s a privilege to be part of this journey, and I’m thrilled to see his words continue to inspire and unite people globally.

The sessions included:

• An evening with acclaimed actors and Faiz’s grandchildren Adeel and Mira Hashmi, interweaving dramatic readings of Faiz’s work with live ghazal performances by the versatile singer Priti Kaur.
• A conversation between noted curator and artist Salima Hashmi, broadcaster Moneeza Hashmi, and academic Prof. Saeed Khan, exploring how Faiz’s poetry has inspired visual art across generations.
• A panel discussion on poetic resistance and solidarity across borders, connecting Faiz’s legacy with that of Neruda, Darwish, Qabbani, and Preti Taneja, through shared themes of justice, dignity, and human resilience.

In addition to the Faiz Festival sessions, audiences were also treated to a Qawwali performance by Najmuddin-Saifuddin Qawwal, masters of the devotional Sufi tradition.

The collaboration is part of the wider arts programming for Bradford 2025 – UK City of Culture, where the British Council is supporting groundbreaking new work by Pakistani artist Meherunnisa Asad, whose installation for Wild Uplands is already drawing attention across national UK media.

Through these initiatives, the British Council continues its commitment to bringing artists and audiences together from Pakistan and the UK to share and exchange creative ideas, fostering mutual understanding and showcasing the richness of contemporary Pakistani culture on the world stage.

London
CNN
 — 

The British royal family’s train will be retired by 2027, as part of a cost-saving measure announced by Buckingham Palace on Monday after “a thorough review into its use and value for money.”

The monarchy has been using its own rail travel since Queen Victoria first boarded a specially built carriage from Slough, England, to London Paddington Station in 1842. The current royal train, which has nine carriages that include sleeping quarters and an office, was introduced in 1977 for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee.

But the costs of royal rail travel rack up quickly, according to the Royal Household’s annual accounts report, which showed that a visit by the King to the English county of Staffordshire in February cost £44,822 ($61,800). Another trip to the Cheshire headquarters of luxury automaker Bentley last year cost more than £33,000 ($45,700). There are also hefty costs associated with storing the royal train at a secure facility in Wolverton, England.

The decision to decommission the train was partly due to “the significant level of investment which would be required to keep the Royal Train in operation beyond 2027,” the report said. Meanwhile, two helicopters provide “a reliable alternative,” it stated. The royals took more than 140 helicopter journeys over the year, with an average cost per trip of around £3,370 ($4,600).

The announcement of the train’s retirement was part of the annual financial statement released by the British Royal Household, which revealed that the annual lump sum it received from the government remained at £86.3 million ($118.50 million).

The sum, called the Sovereign Grant, pays for the upkeep of royal palaces and the royals’ official duties and is funded by British taxpayer money. In return, the monarch hands over all profits from the Crown Estate — which includes vast swathes of central London property, the Ascot Racecourse and the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland — to the government, in an arrangement dating back to 1760.

The Sovereign Grant functions like an expense account for the monarch and their representatives, covering the costs of their public duties, including travel, staff, and upkeep of historic properties. Notably, it excludes funding for security, which also incurs a high cost given the royals’ numerous public engagements and events.

Royal family members undertook more than “1,900 public engagements in the UK and overseas, while more than 93,000 guests attended 828 events at Official Royal Palaces,” the annual Sovereign Grant Report said.

The total grant of £86.3 million ($118.50 million), which by law remains the same as the three previous financial years, is comprised of a £51.8 million ($71.1 million), core grant and £34.5 million ($47.4 million) to fund the refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.

Buckingham Palace, a top tourist attraction in central London, is undergoing a major modernization project that will see upgrades to electric cabling, pipework, elevators and accessible bathrooms.

The report also said the Royal Household will increase its use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and continue the electrification of its fleet of vehicles.

Last year, the Royal Household announced it aimed to transition to an “almost fully electric” fleet of vehicles, without providing a target date. Britain’s PA Media reported that the King’s two Bentleys would be modified to run on biofuel.

The royal family’s three main sources of income are the Sovereign Grant, the Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall estates and their personal property and investments.

The level of funding for the British royal family has long fueled criticism, with one anti-monarchy group calling for the Sovereign Grant to be abolished and for the British public to keep all the profits of the Crown Estate.

“The grant system is mad. Funding goes up not because of any need for extra money, but because the grant is linked to government profits from land managed by the Crown Estate,” Graham Smith, a campaigner for the group Republic, said in a statement earlier this year. “The palace has recycled the excuse of needing the money for refurbishment of Buckingham Palace, an excuse used to double the grant ten years ago.”

“It’s time that half a billion pounds was put to good use, that there was proper accounting for the cost of the monarchy and for that cost to be slashed to just a few million pounds,” Smith added.

The Keeper of the Privy Purse, James Chalmers, said in a statement on Monday as the report was released: “Soft power is hard to measure but its value is, I believe, now firmly understood at home and abroad, as the core themes of the new reign have come into even sharper focus, and the Royal Family have continued in their service to the nation, Realms and Commonwealth.”

 
Rohner: We’ve worked with several hundred thousand people over the past 60-some-odd years on every continent except Antarctica, and while doing that, we’ve learned many lessons about what we’re like and not like as human beings. The beauty of the work we do is that we can now empirically document three things, among others. First, humans everywhere – in any place in the world that we’ve found so far – understand themselves to be cared about or not cared about in the same four ways. So far, no exceptions. Second, if you feel the person or people who are most important to you – these are usually parents when we’re kids and intimate partners when we’re adults, but there could be others like teachers or coaches – if you feel that person doesn’t really want you, appreciate you, care about you, love you, if you feel rejected by that person, most people will respond in exactly the same way. A cluster of 10 things start to happen. We get anxious, insecure. We have anger problems. Our self-esteem is impaired. Children can have issues of cognitive distortions, in which they start to think about themselves in distorted ways. The third important lesson comes from Sumbleen’s work.

Ali: I came to UConn as a psychology student and enjoyed working with Ron so much that I decided to pursue a graduate degree in human development and family sciences. In conversations about IPARTheory, we developed an argument that parental acceptance and rejection might be rooted in our shared biocultural evolution, and I wanted to investigate how that shows up in the brain. This became the focus of my dissertation – the first in affective neuroscience at UConn – under the guidance of my Ph.D. advisors, Preston Britner and Ron Rohner. The research examined how early parental experiences shape emotional regulation. We scanned the brains of students who reported either parental acceptance or rejection while they played a simulated ball-tossing game designed to mimic social exclusion. Those with rejection histories showed more activity in areas linked to emotion and memory, suggesting they were re-experiencing past rejection. Participants who felt loved showed more activation in regions tied to rational thinking, possibly reframing the experience. Now, we’re analyzing resting-state brain data to see whether differences in brain connectivity appear even without an external task.

This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.

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On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the novelists Tash Aw and Jemimah Wei, who connected when Jemimah signed up for Tash’s fiction master class on “time and place” in Singapore back in 2015.

Growing up in Malaysia and Singapore, Tash and Jemimah remember having almost no models for what it might look like to be a writer. The publishing industry – and the literary world – seemed to be headquartered elsewhere. This is why it was so important to Tash to return to his region to teach: to show young writers there what was possible.

After Jemimah had been writing for a while, Tash suggested Jemimah look into graduate school in creative writing, and later he connected her with his literary agent, who now represents them both. Ten years after the master class, their new books were released within weeks of one another, and Jemimah even traveled back to Singapore to help Tash launch his novel in the place where they met.

In the first half of the episode, we discuss why Jemimah stood out to Tash in class, how to make a writing life (especially coming from outside the U.S.), being “genre-agnostic,” revising book-length projects, and what to look for in a literary agent.

In the second half of the episode, Jemimah and Tash share an excerpt from The Original Daughter and The South, and we zoom in on the very themes from Tash’s master class ten years ago: time and place. We focus especially on the factors that influence how we experience time – things like age and maturity level, as well as culture, labor, economics, and the pressure to produce or succeed – and also how we experience time as readers through craft elements like verb tense and perspective, or what Jemimah calls the narrator’s “narrative perch” with respect to past or present events.

 

Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com

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Tash Aw is the author of five novels and a memoir of a Chinese-Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize. His work has won the Whitbread and Commonwealth Prizes, an O. Henry Award and twice been longlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. His novels have been translated into 23 languages. As an essayist and critic, he has contributed to the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New York Times and the Guardian, among many other publications. He is currently a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin.

Jemimah Wei is the author of The Original Daughter. Born and raised in Singapore, she is now based between Singapore and the United States. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Hemmingway House, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, she was named one of Narrative’s “30 below 30” writers and is a Francine Ringold Award for New Writers honouree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and appears in Guernica, Narrative, Joyland, amongst others. For close to a decade, Jemimah was a host for various broadcast and digital channels, and has written and produced short films and travel guides for Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon.

More Jemimah: https://jemmawei.com/

More Tash: https://www.instagram.com/tash.aw/?hl=en

Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.

 

If you think you know Handel’s Semele and its show-stopping aria “Myself I shall adore”, Oliver Mears has other ideas. Far from showing us an explosion of self-indulgent vanity, Mears zeroes in on the cruelty of Juno’s deceit, setting up her husband’s lover to be burnt to a crisp: we feel sympathy for Semele’s vanity, not contempt. And who knew that Pretty Yende sings Handel as if she has been doing so since the cradle? She ran through Handelian semiquavers as if this was the most natural thing in the world, her accents judged with immaculate taste and a voice that sweetened out as it hit the highest fastest notes that might normally go brittle. Mears’ interpretation of the role is an ingénue servant trapped in the hatreds of the rich and powerful and Yende acts it to perfection, injecting Semele’s mood changes into both voice and body language, creating a completely sympathetic character.

Semele may be packed with glamorous melodies, but Mears’ vision of the piece is daringly bleak. It ends well for no-one: Semele dead, her ex-fiancé Athamas and sister Ino trapped in a loveless marriage, Jupiter and Juno doomed to repeat the cycle of infidelity, jealousy and revenge. The only consolation is that the human chorus can drown its sorrows in the product of her womb, the wine god Bacchus.

Yende may have leapt in one bound to the top of the tree of Handelian singing, but the rest of the cast was not far behind both in vocal chops and in acting. In the opera’s other big showstopper, Jupiter’s “Where’er you walk”, Ben Bliss transported us to a place of utter beauty in the most gorgeous of tenors. In Juno’s accompagnato “Awake, Saturnia, from Thy Lethargy”, when Alice Coote decreed “let her fall, rolling down the depths of night”, never has a female voice plumbed the cavernous depths so viciously, and her ensuing rage aria was explosive. As Athamas, Carlo Vistoli was something of a nebbish in Act 1, but when we got to his forced marriage in Act 3, he delivered a bravura piece of melisma singing suffused with sarcasm, spitting the words “Since you so kind do prove” into the faces of Jupiter and Juno, who had destroyed his real beloved.

Brindley Sherratt was similarly anonymous as Cadmus in Act 1, but when he took the role of the Somnus in Act 2, his portrayal of the sleep god as a lecherous dirty old man was vocally rich, completely solid and perfectly consonant with the story. Niamh O’Sullivan was an attractive Ino and even a minor part like Juno’s sidekick Iris came through with style, Marianna Hovanisyan painting a terrifying picture of the dragons guarding Jupiter’s palace in “With adamant the gates are barr’d”. Last but not least, the Royal Opera Chorus were fine ambassadors for Handel and his use of them in classical Greek-Chorus style to provide human comment on divine events.

The evening did have its disappointments, most notably the setting, which is downbeat to the point where it is horribly lacking in visual appeal. Designer Annemarie Woods sets the Olympians’ palace as the kind of conference hotel that I’ve spend a lot of my life trying to avoid: blocky, anonymous and dingily lit. The regal Cadmus is demoted to a bell captain in a cheap suit; the greatest pleasures that Jupiter can summon up for Semele’s delectation seem to be the three Cs of cigarettes, champagne and chocolates. While I’m sure that Mears and Woods are trying to make a point about how ultimately empty is the hedonism provided by such gods, it makes for 90 minutes of fairly dismal viewing in Acts 1 and 2. These also dragged because, despite conductor Christian Curnyn’s best efforts, the Royal Opera Orchestra are not a period band and there was a certain weightiness to the sound which wasn’t masked by the brilliance of the singing.

But all this is forgotten from when the curtain goes up on Act 3 and the drama immediately ratchets up. The setting of Somnus’ lair is gloriously decrepit; the cruel deception of Semele by Jupiter and Juno in turn is vividly portrayed, as is Semele’s own attempts to raise her self-confidence to become something she is not, with the attendant downfall. The bitterness of Mears’ version of the ending may be far from Handel’s intentions, but it is so intelligently staged and acted as to make this opera engaging and thought-provoking, far beyond its music’s undoubted beauties. 

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