https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/16862 2026-06-02T08:24:59Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/146610 Title: An interview with director Barbara Diana Abstract: Barbara Diana's colourful personality has obviously provided the staging of the opera Falstaff at the Manoel Theatre with its multiple hues. A musicologist by training, with a deep personal knowledge of operatic singing on the one hand. and theatre staging on the other, Signora Diana, or Barbara as she likes to be called, has even composed music herself. She has published two monographs on the 20th-century composer Benjamin Britten but admits that her favourite opera is Mozart's La Clemenza di Tito. Barbara starts out from an important principle: the main difference between opera and theatre dramaturgy lies in the music. Opera singers cannot choose the time it would take to say their lines; they are driven by the music and its tempo-rhythm, which is also conditioned by the orchestral colour that is applied to it. So how to work with the music of Falstaff and all that it provides? [excerpt] 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/143505 Title: Reports from ICTMD national and regional representatives : Malta Abstract: Malta report (2026) for The International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD). 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/142808 Title: Petrushka’s survival Authors: Coleman, Jeremy Abstract: First performed in Paris, 1911, the “burlesque” ballet Petrushka stands today as a central work of the modernist canon and an unruly assemblage of artistic media that eludes any attempt to define it simply in terms of a single “author” or as a work independent of its original production. In this chapter, I focus on Petrushka’s reputation precisely as a concert work—its various instrumental reductions, transcriptions, performances, and their own reception history—as a lens through which to consider the relationship between music and (choreographic) motion. Through a brief analysis of the 1965 Swedish television film of Stravinsky’s Three Movements from Petrushka performed by Alexis Weissenberg and directed by Åke Falck, I consider Petrushka’s life, and that of the work’s eponymous puppet, beyond the theater, and examine in what ways the extra-musical elements of the original work were either erased or preserved in “purely musical” versions. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z https://www.um.edu.mt/library/oar/handle/123456789/140521 Title: Making history, combining sounds : British colonialism, Italian culture, and musical growth in the Maltese wind band tradition Authors: Ciantar, Philip Abstract: Malta was a British colony for over 150 years until it became independent in 1964. Though the presence of the British in Malta was considerable and permeated all sectors of Maltese life and culture, the island’s commercial and cultural ties with neighbouring Italy never ceased. This article aims to analyse how Malta’s cultural sympathies and affinities with Italy alongside British colonialism contributed to the musical growth of the wind band tradition in Malta between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century. The co-existence in Malta of the political and cultural conflict brought about by the two competing cultures at this time and, paradoxically, their confluence transpire here as central to processes of musical growth through opportunities for syncretism. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z