Owen Davies was brought up in London but has Welsh roots. He was raised on chapel hymns, Handel oratorios and Mozart arias. He began going to the theatre in the 1960s and, as a teenager, used to stand at the back of the Old Vic stalls to watch Olivier's National Theatre productions. He also saw many RSC productions at the Aldwych in the 1960s. At this time he also began to see operas at Covent Garden and developed a love for Mozart, Verdi and Richard Strauss. After a career as a social worker and a trade union officer, Owen has retired from paid employment but is a student at Rose Bruford College studying for a BA in Opera Studies.
Mozart was a businessman who was always on the lookout for ways to make money and get his music to a wider audience. This singspiel, written in 1782 f...
The Welsh are coming! After a Don Pasquale set in Cardiff around a kebab van, we now have an Elisir set in a café in Barry - admittedly it is run by I...
Stav Meishar, who devised The Escape Act and performed it at Jacksons Lane Arts Centre, modestly describes the piece as a “work in progress”. It is al...
Bellini’s operas marks the transition from eighteenth century Opera Seria to the bel canto operas of the early nineteenth century. Though he died youn...
Count Ory is a comic opera by Rossini that rarely gets performed today. Written for performance in Paris in 1828, the year the Duke of Wellington beca...
This strange trilogy is made up of two short pieces – The Heart’s Ear and Bel Canto – and a longer piece, Silk Moth by Bushra El –Turk, which they ‘bo...
This version of the old Viennese operetta is subtitled The Revenge of the Bat-man. It is charmingly updated to the present day with maids becoming nan...
Forgetting Heledd is a very powerful piece of theatre, telling the story of a family coping with early onset dementia through the eyes and the words o...
The Revenge of the Bat is a better title for this insubstantial piece of Viennese musical farce. Its only claim to a place in the modern repertoire is...
“I am the hidden life that stirs when the candle is out” is the line of the libretto that remains in my memory after this superb production of The Tur...
