Donald Burrows
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 7 May
Donald Burrows’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He's back in business.
When you get to his later years, he then starts to have health problems that interfere with his work more and, of course, his eyesight also goes a little.
But I think, really, he's back...
springing to life in the Messiah period.
Earlier in 1741, he'd done his last Italian opera in London.
After that, there were no more Italian operas.
So leading up to 1741, he had been doing opera and oratorio within the theatre seasons.
There comes a time, early in 1741, he didn't really get on with the management at the King's Theatre, which was the Grand Opera House.
He'd gone to Covent Garden, the new theatre, and for a number of years John Rich thought, aha, we will do plays and Handel can do some oratorios and operas.
After a few years he found he couldn't really quite afford it.
He didn't have the same resources as the King's Theatre.
So what had happened was he said to Handel, you can have my secondary theatre at Lincoln's in Fields, it's cheaper.
But I think he thought by the end of that, I'm not going to be going back to the King's Theatre.
Castrati are so difficult to find these days.
It was the perfect moment when he had this invitation to go to Dublin, to get out.
I think one of the things is that whereas with the operas and most oratorios, you've got settings of metrical verse, rhymed verse and such like, what's happening with this is you have the different rhythms from the prayer book and from the psalms, which means that you've got a particular flow to the English language.
which is not like other things which have been written by poets, shall we say.
So there is something that people recognise about the working of the English language, about religious texts, and Handel has this knack of getting just the right way of setting it to music, you know, to get the music to fit the mood and the sense of the words.
Ruth?
I think that there are various aspects to this.
Showing 41–60 of 179 · page 3 of 9
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