I have often been remiss in keeping this blog up to date so I am not certain how many times I have seen Akhnaten but I have certainly seen every production at ENO.
My online calendar is more help and that tells me that I have seen this production at ENO three times, on screen at Barbican once and online from the MET in New York once, and that my Akhnaten journey started in Ghent in 2015.
As always for Akhnaten I booked a seat in the front row of Dress Circle (A51) which cost me a perfectly reasonable £110. I booked it in July 2022 as soon as booking opened.
Having seen this production five times (or more) I knew what to expect, and that is what I got.
I try to find a regular place to eat for all of my regular theatres and for Coliseum, and other Central London venues, it is Govinda’s vegetarian restaurant just off Soho Square. There the standard thali is a ridiculously low £6.95 and it is very tasty too.
Akhnaten keeps coming back and keeps being completely sold out because it is a phenomenal work.
Obviously that starts with the music by Philip Glass and it builds from there. The playing and the singing are excellent and the staging adds so much tension and drama with lots of slow graceful movement and also a prodigious amount to juggling to compliment the Glass motif rhythms.
The only negative was that ENO is under threat due to funding cuts and so this may well be the last time that I get to see this Akhnaten. I hope their fight to stay is successful because while there are other places that do operas in London none of them has ENO's repertoire. Yes, places outside of London should have companies like ENO too but that does not mean that London should lose its.
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