Richard Jones's new staging of Don Giovanni at English National Opera, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth with innate command of line, tempo and structure, and with strong chorus and top singers, will split audiences even in the course of the evening.
It split audiences when first shown in 2001: regarded by some as a viscerally exciting and truthful vision of the opera; but by others as offensively sexual, and out of step with Mozart's intentions.
MIDGETTE * CONTINUUM The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt is the most renowned of the so-called mystical minimalists, but he also has a tendency to split audiences, with some listeners finding his spare and often repetitive idiom to be breathtakingly beautiful in its simplicity while others find it merely simplistic.
Two attitudes -- on how music should sound, how it should feel and what its purpose should be -- have split audiences, musicians and commentators so decisively that in still a third century, the 21st, the gap is only marginally narrower than it was 100 years ago.
But it really did split the audience.
It split the audience," Richie said at the time.
This is a film to split the audience right down the middle, and possibly down the gender divide.
Producer John Cummings put the Necks on at the London Jazz Festival a few years ago: "That gig completely split the audience.
"It's in nobody's interests to split the audience," said the ITV source, a sentiment with which the BBC would wholeheartedly agree.
In one of his earliest theater pieces, "American Moon," in 1960, he split the audience apart in separate tunnels to give each person a slightly different sense of the action.
