Janáček described his nature-versus-humanity fable The Cunning Little Vixen as “a merry thing with a sad end”. In which case, the even stranger Makropulos Case is a chattery legal mystery with a transcendent end as the 337-year-old (437 in this update) protagonist decides life only has meaning within its natural span and rejects the formula she's come for.You don't feel the transcendence from director Katie Mitchell, who complicates an already wordy text with a whole new subplot where minor character Krista falls in love with Emilia Marty.Although the original play was also written by a Read more ...

It’s a good year to be Handel-lover. No sooner have summer runs of Rodelinda (Garsington) and Saul (Glyndebourne) finished than we’re into autumn and Opera North’s Susanna, Giustino at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, with Ariodante still to come on the main stage.Outings of Susanna don’t come around every day, but Giustino is a proper back-of-the-cupboard rarity – a lighter affair than the big opera serias, short on da capos, and long on supernatural silliness. Throw in a long-lost brother and a bear, and this freely fictionalised account of the rise of sixth-century Emperor Justin I is Read more ...

Forget Anna Netrebko, if you ever gave the Russian Scarpia’s former cultural ambassador much thought (theartsdesk wouldn’t). It should be uphill from now on as Aleksandra Kurzak takes over the role of a diva out of her depth. Last night, though, she was unwell, and the role was taken by Ailyn Pérez, a lyric soprano who knows how to pull out all the right stops and whose dramatic truth complemented Oliver Mears’ production to perfection, presumably on little rehearsal time.Mears plays mostly by the Puccini/Giacosa/Illica rulebook of love and terror in totalitarian Rome - foolish the director Read more ...

Between bouts of that far from shabby, still shocking masterpiece Tosca, Royal Opera music director Jakub Hrůša went for fleshcreep: too little of Bartók's The Miraculous Mandarin – given a chorus, he could have done the half-hour ballet, not just the suite – and too much of a spooky thing in a big Dvořák cantata.The Spectre's Bride was last heard in London at the Proms conducted by Hrůša’s late master Jiří Bělohlávek. I’d only previously heard Rozhdestvensky feature it in a 1991 Prom, and was racking my brains to remember why it didn’t stick. Here’s the reason. Imagine, Read more ...

Poor, slightly silly Semele fries at the sight of lover Jupiter casting off his mortal form, but in Congreve’s and Handel’s supposedly happy ending, everyone else rejoices that Bacchus is the offspring of this dalliance. Or do they? Not in the new production by Royal Opera supremo Oliver Mears, who’s always favoured the dark side. As in trendy dramas like TV’s Kaos, the gods are the callous rich, mortals their plaything servants.The style that guides the creepiness, with an ominous fireplace central in Annemarie Woods’ pointedly chilly, unpretty designs, isn’t always there in the singing ( Read more ...

Full marks to the Royal Opera for good planning: one first night knocking us all sideways with the darkest German operatic tragedy followed by another letting us off the hook with a short comedy by Wagner’s compatriot Telemann. The premiere of Pimpinone predates that of Die Walküre by nearly a century and a half and we mark its 300th anniversary this year. But is it too slight for resurrection?Initially I wondered. The first of Telemann’s three acts, each originally placed as an intermezzo within the composer’s adaptation of Handel’s opera seria Tamerlano for his polyglot city of Hamburg Read more ...

Wagner’s universe, in the second of his Ring operas which brings semi-humans on board to challenge the gods, matches exaltation and misery, terror and tragedy – and throws down a gauntlet to singers, orchestra and director capable of going to extremes with due discipline.They did so masterfully last night, thanks above all to Royal Opera Conductor Laureate Antonio Pappano’s close relationship with four remarkable Wagnerian principals and Barrie Kosky’s dark, spare but always perceptive production, offering the revelation that any new Ring cycle has to provide."It's that woman again," declared Read more ...

So the Royal Opera had assembled a dream cast, conductor (Edward Gardner) and director (Richard Jones). The only question until last night was whether composer Mark-Anthony Turnage would be at his remarkable best. His operatic journey has been uneven, but one thing is now certain: adapting the first Dogme 95 movie, Festen by Thomas Vinterberg, so shocking at a time (1998) when the issue of child abuse rarely surfaced in drama, has yielded music theatre of flawless pace and range.No-one should expect a faithful reflection of the film (which I haven't seen since its release knocked me for six Read more ...

Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first lasts only 20 minutes) featuring the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and the havoc he wreaks, even in death.Benjamin Britten’s Phaedra – a work he called a cantata but which is more like sung psychodrama – uses the poet Robert Lowell’s translation of Racine’s Phèdre to explore the fallout from the character’s disastrous sexual journey. Marrying the Read more ...

This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won him the role of Antonio Pappano’s successor as Music Director, which he takes up at the beginning in the 2025/6 season.From the opening rattle of Janáček's rural mill-wheel – the xylophone used in the first production apparently imported from Czechia, such is his sense of detail – via the strings which flame around the Kostelnička’s terrifying decision to give her stepdaughter a better life by drowning the girl’s baby, to the affirmative brass of the great final scene, Read more ...

What does it mean to have a voice? And what does it mean to lose it? Those are the questions the award-winning Sound Voice Project has explored – through research, collaboration and live performance – since its beginnings in 2016. The latest incarnation of composer Hannah Conway’s project is as “immersive digital opera performance installation”.Down in the bowels of the Royal Opera House, as far away from the hum and chatter of the foyer crowds, the massed voices of the main auditorium, cocooned in an artificially darkened, shrunken Linbury Theatre, we’re invited to meet people whose voices Read more ...

Most of us have been there: an impasse in a marriage, a bereavement in a dysfunctional family. Leonard Bernstein certainly had when he composed Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, basing the unhappy couple on his own parents and even the incipient problems in his own relationship with Felicia Montealegre (see the superb film Maestro), and 30 years later the sequel, A Quiet Place, when Felicia’s early death from cancer had left him unhappy and guilty.Odd, then, that both works keep us emotionally at arm's length, either by stylisation (the one-acter, with the libretto by Bernstein in verse) or by going Read more ...