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Powder Her Face Resources

The following list of resources is continually being updated. If you feel there is anything missing, if a link is not working, or you feel something should be removed, please contact me at e.j.venn@leeds.ac.uk

A list of performances and recordings of Powder Her Face is maintained at http://thomasades.com/compositions/powder_her_face

A score of Powder Her Face can be accessed through his publisher, Faber Music, via a link at https://www.fabermusic.com/music/powder-her-face-2509

 

Powder Her Face: Full Performances

DVD: Powder Her Face; directed for stage by David Alden, directed for television by Margaret Williams (Channel Four Television Corporation, 1999; released on DVD [Digital Classics DC 10002, 2005]).

CD: Powder Her Face: Almeida Opera cond. Thomas Adès (EMI Classics 7243 5 56649 2 1, 1998)

A full theatrical performance of Powder Her Face given in 2019 by the Ópera de Cámera Teatro Colón is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2HiU5470XU

 

Powder Her Face Extracts (listed by performer)

Adams, Hadleigh (Judge), Act II Scene 6 (extract), West Edge Opera (2016)

Bohn, Laura (Duchess) and Jonathan Blalock (voice of Waiter), Act I Scene 4 (extract), West Edge Opera (2016)

Bohn, Laura (Duchess) and Emma McNairy (Reporter), Act II Scene 7 (extract), West Edge Opera (2016) 

Bohn, Laura (Duchess) and Hadleigh Adams (Hotel Manager), Act II Scene 8 (extract), West Edge Opera (2016)

Cook, Allison (Duchess), Act II Scene 6 (extract), New York City Opera (2013)

Cook, Allison (Duchess), Leonardo Capaldo (Electrician) and Kerstin Avenmo (Maid), Act I Scene 1, La Monnaie (2015)

Heyse, Morgane (Waitress), Act I Scene 3, Vienna Volksoper (2019)

Heyse, Morgane (Mistress) and Bart Driessen (Duke), Act I Scene 5, Vienna Volksoper (2019) 

Hulse, Eileen (Waitress), Act I Scene 3, Royal Opera House Linbury Studio (2009)

Miller, Erica (Waitress), Act I Scene 3, Thornton Opera (2006)

Miller, Erica (Mistress) and Joshua Hong (Duke), excerpt from Act I Scene 5, Thornton Opera (2006)

Masaryková, Martina (Waitress), Act I Scene 3, Janáčkova opera Brno (2018) 

Masaryková, Martina (Mistress) and Josef Škarka (Duke), Act I Scene 5 (excerpt), Janáčkova opera Brno (2018)

Škarka, Josef (Hotel Manager, Duke), excerpts, Janáčkova opera Brno (2018)

Sprague, Alexander (Electrician, Lounge Lizard), extracts from Act I Scenes 1 and 2, Royal Danish Opera (2016) 

Zhuravel, Olga (Duchess), extract from Act II Scene 8, Teatro Rossini di Lugo, Bologna (2010)

Zhuravel, Olga (Duchess) and Alan Ewing (Hotel manager), extract from Act II Scene 8, Teatro Arriaga, Bilbao (2016)

 

Powder Her Face trailers (listed by year)

Trailers for different productions of Powder Her Face, giving a flavour of the various approaches to staging, can be found following the links below:

New York City Opera (2013)

Opera Philadelphia (2013)

La Monnaie (2015)

Odyssey Opera (2015)

Royal Danish Opera (2016)

Staatstheater Meiningen (2016)

Gerhart-Hauptmann-Theater (2017)

Theater Aachen (2017) 

Irish National Opera/ Northern Ireland Opera (2018)

Janáčkova opera Brno (2018)

Theater Magdeburg (2018)

Greek National Opera (2019)

Volksopera Wien (2019)

Nouvel Opéra Fribourg (2021)

 

Interviews/Behind the Scenes

Videos can be found following the links below:

Boston Conservatory, audience reaction (2015)

Cook, Allison (Duchess, New York City 2013)

Cook, Allisson (Duchess, La Monnaie 2016)

Hill-Gibbons, Joe (director, English National Opera 2014)

Northern Ireland Opera, set timelapse (2017)

Odyssey Opera, Video Preview (2015)

Poewe, Christian (director, Landestheater Detmold 2018) [in German]

 

Other AV material

24h News, Powder her Face: Thomas Adès y su ópera entre lo posible y lo imposible’ (2018)

24h News,Powder her Face, un escándalo de la nobleza hecho música’ (2018)

Adès, Thomas, ‘In Conversation with Drew Massey’ (2017)

Beecher, Lembert, ‘Introduction to Powder Her Face’, Opera Philadelphia (2013)

Davies, Nick, ‘Femme Fatales of Opera, Adès’s Powder Her Face'Nantucket Community Music Center (2021)

Redmond, Timothy, [Interview with Thomas Adès and Philip Hensher], broadcast on Opera Night with Paul Herriot, RTE lyric fm, 12 May 2018.

 

Academic Writing on Powder Her Face/Duchess of Argyll

Adès, Thomas and Tom Service, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises – Conversations with Tom Service (Faber and Faber, 2012).

Campbell, Margaret, Forget Not: The Autobiography of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (W. H. Allen, 1975).

Cao, Hélène, Thomas Adès le voyageur: Devenir compositeur, être musicien (MF Éditions, 2007).

Castle, Charles, The Duchess Who Dared: The Life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1994).

Gallon, Emma, ‘Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès’ (PhD diss., Lancaster University, 2011).

Gallon, Emma, ‘Hearing Voices in Adès’s Operas’, in Thomas Adès Studies ed. by Edward Venn and Philip Stoecker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021) 213–232.

Grange, Elizabeth C.  ‘Aspects of Celebrity in Three Recent British Operas’ (MPhil diss. University of Manchester, 2015).

Heberlé, Jean-Phillipe (‘Powder her Face de Thomas Adès, ou l’art de l’entre-deux?’, Recherches Anglaises et Nord Americaines, 4:iv (2006), 177–88.

Massey, Drew, ‘Thomas Adès and the Dilemmas of Musical Surrealism’, Gli spazi della musica, 7 (2018), 86–146.

Massey, Drew, Thomas Adès in Five Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Roeder, John, ‘Co-operating Continuities in the Music of Thomas Adès’, Music Analysis, 25/i–ii (2006), 121–54.

Shaw, Kyle, ‘Promiscuity, Fetishes, and Irrational Functionality in Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face’ (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018).

Stevens, Nicholas David, ‘Lulu’s Daughters: Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera 1993–2013’ (PhD diss., Case Western Reserve University, 2017).

Stevens, Nicholas David, ‘“Fountain of youth”, “river of meaning”: Aesthetics of the superficial in Powder Her Face’, in Thomas Adès Studies ed. by Edward Venn and Philip Stoecker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2021), 52–71.

Taruskin, Richard, ‘A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism’, New York Times, 5 December 1999. Reprinted with a postscript in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 144–52.

Venn, Edward, ‘Findings, Keepings, and Borrowings: Uncanny Intertextualities in Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face’ in Intertextuality in Music: Dialogic Composition  ed. by Violetta Kostka, Paulo Ferriera de Castro and William Everett (Routledge, 2021), 217–228.

 

Select Other Writings

Hensher, Philip, ‘Sex, Powder and Polaroids’, Guardian, 29 May 2008, G2 section, p. 23.

Indiana Loiterer III, ‘rrreviews: Powder Her Face at BAM’, Parterre Box 35, December 1998, https://parterre.com/review35.html

Porter, Andrew, ‘New Sound-Worlds discovered’, Observer, 18 June 1995, Review section, p. 5.

Porter, Andew, ‘Powdered and Painted’, Observer, 9 July 1995, Reviews section, p. 9.

Seckerson, Edward ‘Lipstick on her collar; Jill Gomez has been getting her mouth around Ades's new opera’, Independent, 30 June 1995, Classical Music section, p. 15.

Seymour, Claire, ‘Powder Her Face, ENO’, Opera Today, 8 April 2014, www.operatoday.com/content/2014/04/powder_her_face.php