The Importance of Being Earnest

The world now has something rare: a new genuinely comic opera and maybe the most inventive Oscar Wilde opera since Richard Strauss's Salome more than a century ago. The Los Angeles Times Gerald Barry's riotous opera brings out the savagery beneath the genteel Edwardian manners of Wilde's play: its score includes gunshots, whistling and speaking from the orchestral players, marching boots, and the smashing of 40 dinner plates, while its characters among them Lady Bracknell sung by a bass and Cecily by a stratospheric soprano shout at each other through gales, quote Schiller's Ode to Joy (in German) and make polite conversation through megaphones. 'Its all completely bonkers, but I went in grumping and came out grinning. What more can you ask?' The Telegraph