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Episode 2

In this episode of 'Sounds and Sweet Airs', Michelle Assay talks with composer John Casken and singer Sir John Tomlinson about their new drama The Shackled King, a condensed version of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

The Shackled King starts at the end of the play where the King and Cordelia are in prison, he hardly recognising his daughter. Through a series of flashbacks the story is told, but returns to the present, in prison, a number of times. The work is for two singers with a small ensemble. The role of Lear is sung by a bass, and Cordelia by a mezzo-soprano who also sings the part of the King’s philosophical friend, the Fool.

00:02:27: Beer garden beginnings

00:09:27: Wotan and Lear

00:18:08: Memory

00:25:28: Libretto and title

00:27:43: The Fool

00:29:29: Instrumentation

00:33:48: Inspirations: 'Shakespeare never preaches'

00:41:10: Genre, word setting, psychology

00:49:37: Staging, rehearsal, performance

01:02:55: Musical language

01:09:17: Final thoughts: mournfully human and full of gaps

Sir John Tomlinson was awarded a CBE in 1997 and knighted in 2005. He has sung for the world’s leading opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Deutsche Oper and Staatsoper, Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Geneva and Paris, the Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence, Munich and Glyndebourne festivals and all the leading British companies. He made his Bayreuth Festival debut in 1988 as Wotan (Der Ring des Nibelungen) under Daniel Barenboim and went on to sing there every summer from 1989 to 2006.

John Casken is a composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, choral music and music for the stage in the form of two operas, a melodrama, a monodrama, and a dramatic work based on King Lear. His two operas have been performed internationally with seven productions of the first one, Golem (1989) in England, USA, Germany and France, and two productions of the second, God’s Liar (2001), in London, Brussels, and Vienna.