“An 11-year-old British composer has earned comparisons with Mozart after her opera opened in Vienna to a standing ovation,” writes Hannah Furness in Friday’s (12/30) Guardian (U.K.). “Alma Deutscher, who lives in Surrey with her parents, was already … a violinist and pianist before her first full-length opera made its debut on the Austrian stage on Thursday. The work re-imagined the Cinderella fairytale to be set in an opera house ruled by a wicked stepmother, where Cinderella is a composer whom Deutscher described as ‘a bit like me.’ It is Deutscher’s most ambitious work yet, having written her first piano sonata at six years old, and a short opera based on a story by Neil Gaiman when she was seven. She also performed on stage in Cinderella, playing musical interludes on the piano and violin.” Deutscher’s mother is an organ scholar at Oxford and her father is an amateur flutist. “The opera is two and a half hours long with the musical score running to 237 pages. Instead of the glass slipper of the fairytale, the prince looks for a lost melody he cannot quite remember.… Conductor Simon Rattle declared he was ‘absolutely bowled over’ when he first saw her perform.”
Posted January 3, 2017
