The Royal Opera season concluded, as is now customary, with an evening in which the participants in what used to be the Vilar Young Artists programme, in the light of events renamed the Jette Parker Young Artists, are paraded to show their progress. They make a truly international team, as the slip inside the programme indicated: ‘Ji-Min Park has withdrawn…the role of Il Conte di Libenskof will be sung by Ji Hyun Kim…the role of Zefirino…will now be sung by ZhengZhong Zhou.’ For the first time the programme consisted of a single work; previously it has been made up of excerpts from several. This one was chosen, needless to say, in an Olympic spirit, for which no opera is better suited than Rossini’s Il viaggio a Reims, which has a cast of 18 characters, and deals with their passing the time while they wait for transport (isn’t that sailing a bit close to the wind?) to take them to Rheims for the coronation of Charles X.
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