opera directors
Boyd Tonkin
One door closes, and another one opens. A lot. It’s extraordinary what value those two simple additions to the Royal Albert Hall stage lent to Glyndebourne’s performance of The Marriage of Figaro at the Proms.Combined with some niftily manoeuvred furniture, minimal suggestions of a garden for the outside scenes, and the genius touch of a bathtub for the Count in Act Three, a few strategically deployed items made sure that we enjoyed pretty much a full staging of this signature piece for the Sussex house.The cast, in period costume, used the width of their space well and climbed, when Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Sometimes, as the first act of Beethoven’s Fidelio closes, the chorus of prisoners discreetly fade away backstage as their brief taste of liberty ends. At Garsington Opera, in Jamie Manton’s revival of a production by John Cox, they slowly descended, one by one, through a circular trap at the front of the stage. We see and hear freedom’s loss, person by person, step by agonising step.Then I strolled out onto the Garsington terrace as the evening sun set with its midsummer languor over the Wormsley estate’s vast acres of lake, woods and grazing deer. And thought, as Beethoven insisted we must Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Marianne Moore once famously defined poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Operas also fill, or anyway should fill, their artificial horticulture with genuine beasts – and flowers. And no work demands the population of a fanciful landscape with authentic passion more urgently than Così fan tutte. Mozart transforms this shabby little shocker of a plot – as the meddling know-all Don Alfonso “tests” the two sisters’ fidelity to their sweethearts – into a vehicle for music of exquisite truthfulness that grows from a bed of fraud and lies.At the Nevill Holt festival in rural Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Thankfully, Julia Burbach’s version of The Flying Dutchman for Opera Holland Park doesn’t try to be one of those concept-laden productions that banishes all sight of the sea.Because last night the ocean – or rather its typical weather – came to us. A stiff south-westerly punched for hours across the awnings of the semi-open theatre’s canopy. Gale-force (well, almost) sound-effects partnered the City of London Sinfonia as its muscular brass summoned the sonic storm that opens Wagner’s breakthrough opera, and never quite let up.That said, Naomi Dawson’s set avoids any barnacled naturalism. Read more ...
David Nice
Ireland takes the palm for best of 2024, with Wexford hitting comic heights among its three rarities in Donizettian let’s-make-an-opera, while Irish National Opera gave us a world-class Salome, a Vivaldi rarity strongly cast, a Rigoletto featuring my favourite performance from a Manchester-born Irish-Iranian soprano, and the perfect solution to Berlioz’s half-Shakespearean Béatrice et Bénédict, thanks to Fiona Shaw and three more sensational Irish women.Before we deal with those, let’s celebrate another Irish soprano in English National Opera’s most gripping offering of the year. We’ve sorely Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s somehow typical of the Welsh National Opera I’ve known now for the best part of sixty years that it should confront its current funding difficulties with brilliant productions of two of the more challenging works in the repertory.The company’s marvellous Death in Venice is for the time being water under the Bridge of Sighs, but now it has come up with a superb staging of Puccini’s complicated triptych of one-acters, a rarity no doubt partly because of its length and rehearsal and casting demands. Admittedly it’s a co-production with Scottish Opera and was seen in Glasgow just over a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Why would anyone want to stage a work like The Merry Widow in this day and age? Silly question. It’s the music, stupid. Of course, it’s an entertaining story and there are some good jokes. But I'd bet that if Heuberger had composed the music to this libretto, as he started doing, instead of Franz Lehár, who took it on afterwards, I wouldn't now be writing about Cal McCrystal’s new Glyndebourne production, or anyone else’s for that matter.I realise this might not be quite McCrystal’s opinion. To judge from his approach in Sussex, he sees the work as a comedy with musical attachments. Or from a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Set in a tensely polarised Roman neighbourhood, with an election in the offing and radicals scrapping with reactionaries under poster-plastered walls, Stephen Barlow’s smart update of Tosca from 1800 to 1968 might have felt like a double dose of period-piece on its first outing at Opera Holland Park in 2008. Strongly cast and crisply delivered, this polished and gripping revival gives us Puccini the prophet as well as the pot-boiler. Unctuous and bullying by turns, Morgan Pearse’s Scarpia is a sharp-suited populist schemer whose election posters – stuck across the walls of Yannis Read more ...
mark.kidel
Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice (1973), adapted from Thomas Mann’s novella of the same name (1912) and the subject of one of Visconti’s later, most celebrated films, explores homoerotic attraction, the nature of beauty and the inescapable presence of mortality.Britten lay ill, close to death, within sight of the sea, as does the story’s elderly writer Gustav von Aschenbach. The composer was unable to attend the premier in Aldeburgh, in which the title role was sung by his partner the tenor Peter Pears.The tragic story, in which a famous and burnt-out writer seeks solace in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
A single pair of swans glided serenely under the bridges of the river Ill as I walked to the premiere of the Opéra National du Rhin’s new production of Lohengrin in Strasbourg on Sunday.It felt like an auspicious omen for Michael Spyres’s first full performance of a major Wagnerian role. Spyres’s initiation comes after the Missouri-born singer’s acclaimed flights across huge tracts of the Baroque, classical and Romantic repertoire – a journey taken on the mighty but sensitive wings of his category-busting, three-octave-wide “baritenor” voice.The packed house in the 1820s theatre (many of them Read more ...
David Nice
Abandon hope of the human comedy so precisely charted in Hilary Mantel’s related historical fiction The Giant, O’Brien, prepare for a vision of outsized body and soul revealed in sleep, and your patience will be rewarded. Sarah Angliss’s haunting Giant, premiered at last year's Aldeburgh Festival, is perfectly served by her own soundscape, a dedicated team of musicians and Sarah Fahie’s pitch-perfect production.Its stated intention is to avoid making too much of a God out of Irish giant Charles Byrne and too much of a Satan of Scottish surgeon, scientist and collector John Hunter, who may Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Trials by fire and water pale in comparison with trials by Arts Council England. English National Opera’s long torment has lately involved redundancy notices issued mid-performance and the enforcement of a sub-standard contract for chorus and musicians. Yet here they are, singing and playing their hearts out in an exhilarating reprise of a trusted old favourite: Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute, first staged in 2013 and now on its fourth outing in the capable hands of revival director Rachael Hewer.I know that McBurney’s busy, tricksy take on the mystical pantomime of Mozart’s Read more ...