Dr Dee, Damon Albarn's new opera features brilliant music from the frontman, and the soundtrack is now officially ready for pre-order online in Amazon (click to go to page) ! It's a 1 disc CD by Parlophone and it features a very ethereal Albarn in black and white :
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It's time for a review! Since I have no chance of seeing Doctor Dee live, I will present to you the first proper review, by The Guardian, on Doctor Dee - Damon Albarn's opera, which premiered last Friday night at the Manchester International Festival 2011.
4/5 stars
It is perhaps as much a disservice to call the 16th century alchemist and astrologer John Dee a Renaissance man as it is to refer to Damon Albarn as the former frontman of Blur. Neither scratches the surface of their achievements.
Dee was an occultist, hermetic and spiritual advisor to Elizabeth I who appointed the Queen's coronation day through the alignment of the planets.
A world famous scholar who dabbled in the undefined area between science and sorcery, he was reputed to be the model for Marlowe's Dr Faustus and Shakespeare's Prospero. And by applying Euclidean principles to navigation, he laid the visionary blueprint for the British empire.
Now latter-day polymath Albarn has created an opera based on the life of this mysterious philosopher. The pairing seems irresistible: an inscrutable but undeniably beautiful meditation on Englishness inspired by the man who coined the term "Britannia" and written by a musician who made it cool.
Dr Dee is an erudite affair, inspired by the philosopher's exile to Manchester in the 1580s, where he founded the English speaking world's first public library. It's extraordinary to think that whereas Albarn has been bringing himself up to speed with concepts of hermeticism, Euclidian geometry and Rosicrucianism, his erstwhile Britpop rival Liam Gallagher has formed Beady Eye.
Damon Albarn performs on the preview night of the opera 'Dr Dee' at Manchester Palace Theatre. Photograph: Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage
Even so, Dr Dee is by no means an opera in the conventional sense. Instead director Rufus Norris lays on a sumptuous array of scenes and tableaux that draw upon the lavish stage mechanics of an Elizabethan masque. If there's a parallel to be drawn it might be with Berlioz's similarly grandiose "dramatic legend" the Damnation of Faust.
You suspect that the main reason Albarn creates a sound-world combining kora, theorbo, and Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen is because he can. More contentious is his decision to cast himself as a kind of troubadour-narrator, as it slightly negates the dramatic function of Bertie Carvel's Dr Dee, whose role becomes largely mute.
Yet there is genuine dramatic frisson delivered by the ice-cold counter-tenor of Christopher Robson as Edward Kelley, the psychic or "scryer" who became Dee's ultimate undoing.
Dee commissioned Kelley to commune with the angels; the angels apparently suggested that Kelley be allowed to sleep with the Doctor's wife.
Albarn's opera can seem obscure and sometimes wilfully perverse. But it reaches to the heart of the tragedy of an overreaching intellect destroyed by a deal with a second-rate Mephistopheles. Dee was haunted by his shortcomings: "You know I cannot see, nor scry" he lamented.
Yet for Albarn, who ends the evening triumphantly aloft against a panorama of the cosmos, the scry's the limit.
Pretty good review, in fact it's EXCELLENT. Damon's reached a whole new level with his opera performing, and I can't wait for footage of it to surface, or perhaps there'll be a soundtrack album like Monkey Journey to the West.
You must watch Damon Albarn talk about Doctor Dee in the video below. He discusses his opera (mistakenly named "Dr. John Dee" in The Guardian's website ! ) ahead of it's premier on Friday Night in Machester International Festival.
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We have a surprise after a lack of news lately - Damon Albarn performed a new song from his new opera Doctor Dee in The Andrew Marrs show yesterday. The song's named "Apple Carts" and it is beautifully sounding, with Albarn's deep croning and soft guitar playing, and kind of resembles his style in The Good The Bad and The Queen. Listen to it byCLICKING HERE.
You can also watch the full interview from BBC website (UK Only) byclicking HERE.
The following commentary was by dougharrison from the Blur forums thread:
The only thing said about the opera that were newly mentioned are that:
1) Its an exploration of Englishness at the time and Dee is the central character rather than it being purely about Dee.
2) The show is in 3 sections a celestial plane, where musicians such as Tony Allen, the stage/England presumably and an underworld, where the main orchestra is.
Damon is still not a huge fan of interviews, didn't seem particularly comfortable. After the part about Dee being English the interviewer said this had been present in previous work and Damon said something along the lines of that it was a totally separate from Blur project, but some songs could have been Blur songs and concluded by saying he didn't know what place i.e. project/band he is currently at and writing for. I probably haven't rephrased that particularly well.
I really like the song, it's a great start to possibly a new album by Damon Albarn after his opera, hopefully like Monkey Journey to the West. It's beautiful and soothing, and a song about Silbury Hill and apples fits Damon's simple British style of music writing.
Doctor Dee the opera will premier at the Manchester International Festival in July 2011, and it will then be staged at the home of the English National Opera as part of London's Cultural Olympiad programme.
Visit their official website here and follow them!
Damon Albarn's new opera Doctor Dee has received some press from a double page spread in the 28th May GUARDIAN newspaper, on the guide to Manchester International Festival.
Quoted from the article, Damon Albarn's new show is a 'modern English opera' directed by Rufus Norris, about Elizabethan thinker and magician John Dee. In Doctor Dee, Damon Albarn will appear as himself, rather than in character, performing with legendary afrobeat drummer (and bandmate in The Good, The Bad and The Queen) Tony Allen. The BBC Philharmonic will be in the pit. There will also be Elizabethan instruments and some ritualistic elements, will be primal, about the life, ambition and belief of John Dee.
Read the whole article by clicking below, thanks damon4president and 2J for the scans.
4/5 stars
