Review: Tangier Tattoo: Morocco and Roll to Coax Young Audience to Opera

Summary

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AGEING audiences are a major problem for classical music, particularly opera. Only last week, Scottish Opera chairman William Taylor expressed his belief that there were "too many grey hairs" among traditional opera attendees. Maybe this hearty, silver-haired QC should splash on some Grecian 2000 and get along to the Edinburgh Festival Theatre this Friday, where Glyndebourne on Tour is mounting the Scottish premiere of a bold new opera it has commissioned especially for the 18-30 age group.

Tangier Tattoo is about a young backpacker in Morocco who finds himself steamily entangled with an attractive American spy. Echoes of Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, perhaps? Undoubtedly. But this Moroccan adventure, and the music that goes with it, is much more hardcore.

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Extract

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Review: Tangier Tattoo: Morocco and Roll to Coax Young Audience to Opera

So much so, it horrified many London critics at its Glyndebourne premiere in October. It wasn't the sex, drugs and violence that irritated them; more the music's unashamedly populist stance. "This isn't proper opera," many of them moaned, especially the grey- haired ones mor...

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