MUSIC
Who: Mick Hadley & The Atomic Boogie Band
• What: Free Sunday Sessions
• Where: The Tempo Hotel - 388 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley
• When: Sunday, July 11 & 25 from 2pm
• Cost: Free admission
• Who: Asa & Friends
• What: Asa Broomhall Band and special musical guests
• Where: Stage Door @ The Tempo Hotel (formerly Dooley’s Hotel)
• When: Saturday July 3, 10, 24 & 31 from 8PM
• Admission: $10
Throughout Mick Hadley’s career in music, one thing has stood out, stagecraft. From his early work in The Purple Hearts, the seminal Brisbane band The Coloured Balls through The Last Shout, The Shakers, The Midnight Blues Band and now with The Atomic Boogie Band, Mick is known as a master on stage.
His energy and vibrant stage persona has left many an audience member overwhelmed. Now stepping out of semi-retirement, Hadley (pictured) will be playing a set of special reunion shows in July at The Tempo Hotel in Fortitude Valley.
The Tempo Hotel (formerly known as Dooley’s Hotel) is the place to be on Sundays for their free Sunday sessions and who better to jump start things off than Mick and his Atomic Boogie Band. Then there’s Asa & Friends, when the Asa Broomhall band and their special guests will provide a rare chance to see a musician’s musician play a series of casual shows with some close musical friends.
It’s coming to Stage Door @ The Tempo Hotel (formerly Dooley’s Hotel) in Fortitude Valley over four dates in July. Asa and his band will open each night with their exuberant take on roots, rock and blues and then the night’s guest will play full sets with their own band before the night ends with some surprising collaborative efforts.
Opera the new black?
The press release shouts that “opera & ballet is the new black’. That bit of nonsense doesn’t deserve to score any coverage, but your reporter is, as the editor of this journal noted when he forwarded the message, “an old opera buff”, so here goes.
What’s happening is that the move to make high definition, high quality sound live transmissions of opera, ballet, theatre and (inevitably if not already) classical concerts to cinemas around the world is growing. The houses concerned, several of the world’s best, send recordings to those of us for whom that is not practical (e.g. because of time differential).
We have seen several seasons of pioneering productions from New York’s Metropolitan Opera and very satisfying they have been. More recently several series from European houses have graced local screens. Right now we are in the midst of an interesting mixed series showing at the Palace Barracks.
The Royal Opera (Covent Garden) production of Verdi’s Don Carlo runs July 23, 24, 25 and 28; Royal Ballet Liszt’s Mayerling August 13-18; Royal Ballet Henze’s Ondine; September 3-8; and the Globe Theatre Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost September 17 to 22. The next Met series of 11 operas starts, neatly enough, in mid October and runs roughly monthly until mid May, in cinemas around the world. Here they will be at Centro and Portside, which are also showing a winter season repeating some of the past season’s highlights: Verdi's Aida (July 18 and 22), Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffman, Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, and Bizet's Carmen.
The new New York dates (we come in usually some days, perhaps even two weeks , later) are: October 9, Wagner’s Das Rheingold conducted by James Levine; October 23, Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (Valery Gergiev); November 13 Donizetti’s Don Pasquale (James Levine); December 11,Verdi’s Don Carlo (Yannick Nézet-Séguin); January 8, Puccini’s La Fanciulla Del West (Nicola Luisotti); February 26, Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride (Patrick Summers); March 19, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (Patrick Summers); April 9, Rossini’s Le Comte Ory (Maurizio Benini); April 23, Strauss’s Capriccio (Andrew Davis); April 30, Verdi’s Il Trovatore (James Levine); May 14, Wagner’s Die Walküre (James Levine).
This is magic stuff. We are very lucky.
David Bray
