Glyndebourne
alexandra.coghlan
Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is too other-worldly to have anything as mortal as a musical heartbeat. Pulsing through it instead are musical quivers, jolts of eerie energy first heard in the opening cello glissandi. Denaturing the instrument, transforming it from a voice so nearly human to one of harmonic and textural androgyny, Britten cuts away the safety cables of Shakespeare’s framing court scenes, plunging his young lovers straight into the fairy forest where anything is possible and nothing is as it seems. As a theatrical sleight of hand it’s almost impossible to match, but Peter Read more ...
David Nice
Locations count for little in most of Shakespeare's comedies. Only a literal-minded director would, for instance, insist on Messina, Sicily as the setting for Much Ado About Nothing. In Béatrice et Bénédict, on the other hand, Berlioz injects his very odd Bardolatry with lashings of the southern Italian light and atmosphere he loved so much. So turning it all grey as Laurent Pelly does and putting everyone into boxes except the loving enemies who think outside them - get it? - goes against the grain. But then colour is leached away from just about everything in this far from vintage Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Is The Cunning Little Vixen a jolly children’s pantomime, or is it a searching study of issues of life and death, Man and Nature? The answer, naturally, is that it’s both. Children dress up as animals, and sing and prance about. But at the same time grown-ups (both animal and human) dream and fantasize, couple and procreate, hunt and kill. Remarkably, it’s a tragedy that leaves no bitter taste. The heroine dies, but Nature goes on. The hardest thing to understand about hunters is that they identify with and even love their prey. But this is precisely the crux of Melly Still’s brilliant Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A celebration of the power of words and music (leaving aside, briefly, that more troubling business about the Fatherland), Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is a natural opener for the summer opera season. Art triumphs over all, but in David McVicar’s production it’s a triumph of peculiarly human complication – a victory that leaves a hero in tears, that crowns some of opera’s most reactionary stick-in-the-muds with laurels, and leaves us asking: did Eva really pick the right man?It has been well over a year since Richard Jones’s Mastersingers came to English National Opera, but it’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Remember back when David Hare was left-wing? I’m not sure that he does. Between the affectionate, bittersweet nostalgia of South Downs and now The Moderate Soprano – a stroll through the verdant history of England’s most exclusive opera company – we’re suddenly a long way from the school of Slag or the urban anger of Racing Demon. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when – as here, in the programme interview – Hare claims that “heritage theatre is not my thing” it’s getting harder and harder to believe him.The anger has drained out of this theatre Read more ...
David Nice
Ask opera-lovers to name their favourite one-acter and chances are the choice will be L’enfant et les sortilèges. Colette’s typically off-kilter fable of a destructive kid confronted with the objects and animals he’s damaged is set by Maurice Ravel to music of a depth which must have taken even that unshockable author by surprise. Ravel’s earlier L’heure espagnole, on the other hand, is much less likely to be top of the list. The farcical ‘Spanish hour’ – 50 minutes, to be precise, and Ravel’s sense of timing otherwise is – proves only one thing: how potent a cheap plot can be when Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
I can’t remember a time I felt so profoundly disquieted by a Handel staging. It’s partly that, as an oratorio, Saul breaks so many dramatic rules that lend the operas their reassuring structural certainty, but there’s also something – a tenderness certainly, but also a violence – to Barrie Kosky’s production that uncouples the music from any residual cosiness England’s favourite adopted composer still inspires in British audiences. It’s unsettling and exhilarating in about equal measure, a startlingly sensitive and telling statement from a director better known for his dramatic shock-and-awe. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Britten’s first chamber opera is very much a Glyndebourne piece; its world premiere in the old festival theatre in July 1946 was also the festival’s inaugural post-war production. It brought into being the English Opera Group, and led soon afterwards to the foundation of the Aldeburgh Festival. So it’s good, in principle at least, to have it back on the main stage here, after an initial airing on tour in 2013. I say in principle, because in practice the work and its staging present so many problems that I can’t ever recall seeing a production without wincing with irritation. And this Read more ...
David Nice
What a difference seven years can make to a budding genius. Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (1775) has only patches of brilliance, and last year’s Glyndebourne production, despite musical excellence, failed them all. This time an experienced director on best form, David McVicar, finds more nuanced humanity in the composer’s first mature German drama, Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The Abduction from the Seraglio, 1782) than I’d have believed possible, mirrored in the light and fire of Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. If you think Mozart’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
After Calixto Bieito’s radical reimaging of Carmen, which opened at English National Opera this week, David McVicar’s version at Glyndebourne was bound to seem conservative. But it turned out to be a comparison of apples and Seville oranges: Bieito is certainly bolder, but McVicar is more sophisticated and digs deeper into the raw emotions of the work. It’s not a new production, but revival director Marie Lambert has kept it fresh, aided by a stunning cast and dynamic, energised conducting from Jakub Hrůša.McVicar sets his Carmen in the mid-to-late 19th century, a gentle updating that is most Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Fashion is a funny thing, in opera no less than the sartorial trappings that go with it (everything from tight, hipster trews to billowing ballgowns at last night's Glyndebourne season opening, in case you were wondering). Donizetti's classical tragedy Poliuto is historically a miss rather than a hit, never quite finding its footing in the repertoire, despite some early success. But on the strength – and strength of appropriately gladiatorial proportions it really is – of Glyndebourne's exceptional cast, Poliuto may yet make its case as a classic: a sober meditation on Read more ...
David Nice
When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.Fortunately I didn’t need to lean too hard on my Read more ...