Leeds
Nicky Spence
I’m a big fanboy of Czech music, Janáček and Martinů especially, but I’d never seen The Greek Passion before being cast as Manolios in Opera North’s new production, as it remains quite a rarity in the opera house. For those who don’t know the work, it tells of a group of refugees who arrive in a village as the residents there are preparing for their Easter Passion Play. Martinů explores the community’s reaction to this influx of new people and the conflicting emotions that their arrival engenders.Martinů (pictured left in his American exile in 1943, a a decade and a half before he Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North created something approaching a new art form when they performed Wagner’s Ring in "concert stagings", putting their large orchestra in full view, with singers symbolically dressed and given limited front-of-stage space, and a continuous projected screen backdrop. That approach was also used for their Turandot two years ago, and now method and team are reunited as Sir Richard Armstrong conducts Aida with Annabel Arden as director and design by Joanna Parker.The positives are considerable. Gone are conventional stage effects; instead, the performance is aurally stunning, with a Read more ...
Annabel Arden
This will be the latest in Opera North’s acclaimed concert stagings of large-scale works, which have previously included Wagner’s Ring cycle, Puccini’s Turandot and Strauss’s Salome. For Verdi’s Egyptian epic, we’ve recreated the team which brought Turandot to the concert stage, including myself as director, Sir Richard Armstrong as conductor, and designer Joanna Parker, who will be looking after all the visual aspects.I find it exciting to treat iconic works like this because the performances offer a new way to experience classic opera. When you get rid of the proscenium arch, you feel very Read more ...
graham.rickson
Stravinsky acknowledged that his orchestra for The Rite of Spring was a large one because Diaghilev had promised him extra musicians (“I am not sure that my orchestra would have been as huge otherwise.”) It isn’t huge in Opera North’s production (★★★★★), and for practical reasons they're using the edition arranged by Jonathan McPhee in 1988 for a standard pit band. I expected to be underwhelmed, but, as conducted by Garry Walker, it sounded terrific, most of the sonic thrills emerging unscathed.This staging, a collaboration between Opera North and Leeds’s Phoenix Dance Theatre, marks the UK Read more ...
Robert Beale
A sad tale’s best for winter, and Opera North have returned to Janáček’s lyrical taken on a classic Russian drama of domestic abuse, guilt and suicide for this ingredient of their current season. Director Tim Albery and designer Hildegard Bechtler created their production 12 years ago, revisiting their partnership on the same opera for the company eight years before that. It seems to cheer up a little each time… but only a little.In 1999 the whole thing was virtually set-less and the costumes universally drab-grey, the better to emphasise the stifling and loveless respectability against which Read more ...
graham.rickson
Robert Alan Evans’ adaptation of Kes is a dark, expressionist reworking of Barry Hines’ novella. It pays lip service to Ken Loach’s iconic film version, and most of the memorable bits are present and correct here: the wince-inducing rant from head teacher Mr Gryce is a highlight, as is the PE teacher’s sadistic insistence that poor Billy has to take a shower. Evans distils the book into just 70 minutes without diluting its anger, the original’s dense narrative reshaped into a series of tiny scenes. Hines’ Barnsley-set story focuses on 15-year-old Billy Caspar, a misfit destined to Read more ...
graham.rickson
The story behind the making of first-time director Mitu Misra’s Lies We Tell is often easier to make sense of than what happens in the film: Misra realised the project with money from his double-glazing business and plenty of bull-headed persistence. Its various disparate elements don’t all co-exist happily, notably a phoned-in cameo from Harvey Keitel as ageing businessman Demi.Despite Keitel’s top billing, his character dies within the first two minutes, the video evidence of his extra-curricular activities the MacGuffin which propels the story. Get past the risible opening sequence (yes, Read more ...
Richard Farnes
Commentators have, over the years, variously described Un ballo in maschera (A Masked Ball) as all things to all people: Verdi’s Tristan und Isolde, Verdi’s masterpiece, Verdi’s Don Giovanni, a pure love poem, and much more. It seems to me to be one of his most consistently exciting works, perfectly proportioned and dramatically astute.Interestingly, in this instance Verdi did not feel the need to make the extensive revisions that he undertook to the operas either side of it in his canon – Simon Boccanegra, La forza del destino and Don Carlos. Its creation was relatively swift, and its Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Love, Lies & Records (BBC One) is one of those bathetic titles that are very Yorkshire. See also Last Tango in Halifax, which didn’t do badly. Sleepless in Settle is surely in development. This is the new drama from Kay Mellor, who set Band of Gold in a sorority of sex workers and Fat Friends among people mustering at Weightwatchers. With her long-established nose for a good yarn, she now moves in on that boiling cauldron of drama, Leeds city hall.It’s quite a shrewd concept. All human life is here: birth, marriage and alas death, all of them neatly packaged up into the opening episode's Read more ...
Annabel Arden
The first day of rehearsals for The Little Greats was thrilling and terrifying in equal measure: the casts of six shows, the whole chorus, all the creative teams and management milling around and talking nineteen to the dozen in the big, reverberant Linacre Studio at Opera North. Old friends, new colleagues – it was like a mixture of freshers’ week and a first night party. The noise was stupendous.As I write, I’m in Leeds directing two out of the six short operas making up Opera North’s varied and exciting new season. Opera does not come in only two flavours, comic or tragic. As in any Read more ...
graham.rickson
I’ve seen the future, and it’s semi-staged. The gains here are far more significant than the losses. And where Opera North’s minimalist Leeds Town Hall Ring let Peter Mumford’s video projections fill in the gaps, this new production of Turandot is costumed, lit and directed, lacking only a backdrop. The chorus are squeezed stage right, tightly crammed into the choir seats. The cast gamely do their thing in the narrow space betwixt strings and stage.For such a macabre, dark work, there’s an awful lot of grinning going on – notably from Opera North’s on-form orchestra, gleefully let off Read more ...
graham.rickson
Amy Leach’s energetic Romeo and Juliet is fast, furious and a little breathless, the setting transposed from Verona to a fairly grim contemporary Leeds. Think West Yorkshire Side Story. Leach’s starting point was hearing about conflict resolution in a local high school created by merging a pair of formerly rival institutions, and her programme note also explicitly links the production to a divided post-Brexit Britain, a place where long-buried differences have fractured previously stable relationships. And the energy is specific to modern Leeds, which each summer hosts a hedonistic music Read more ...