Royal Opera
igor.toronyilalic
Filmed extracts of a fantastically vivid 1954 production of Janáček's The Cunning Little Vixen have been unearthed by the great blogger Doundou Tchil of Classical Iconoclast. Václav Neumann is the conductor; Berlin's Komische Oper is the house. Whets the appetite for tonight's Bill Bryden revival production at Covent Garden. Hard to imagine the sets or the acting (watch that singing vixen scrambling about before the poacher) being bettered. My friend says I'm setting myself up for a fall. But Sir Charles Mackerras will no doubt give Neumann a run for his money.
Book for The Cunning Little Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Graham Vick's Tamerlano is less of an opera and more of a warning. In four and half hours you see 26 ways of how not to handle the Baroque aria. Dramatic success in Handel and his psychological flights of mainly soliloquising fancy is never easy but last night's ill-fated Royal Opera House production (Placido Domingo called in sick a few weeks back) was a lesson in abject theatrical failure. Or actually 26 lessons (there are around 27 arias in all). First up in the Graham Vick how-not-to-illustrate-an-aria class: clog-dancing. Particularly not to be used as an opener, particularly not Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Royal Opera House announced today that Plácido Domingo is withdrawing from next month's production of Tamerlano at Covent Garden. Domingo, who turned 69 in January, was due to sing the role of Bajazet in Handel's opera over seven performances between 5 and 20 March. But he has been suffering from lower abdominal pain while performing in Tokyo, and has returned to New York for preventive surgery. The hope is that he will be back performing in six weeks. The American tenor Kurt Streit, who was already going to sing the role of Bajazet on 13 and 17 March, is now taking over the entire run. Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Two very different lessons on love this week. From the Aphrodite-like Joyce DiDonato at the Wigmore Hall, there emerged a correct, wise, honest way to achieve an enamoured state; from the familiarly fickle cast of Così fan tutte - an almost unwatchably faulty bunch of emotional primitives in Jonathan Miller's production for the Royal Opera - very much the wrong way.Miller is absolutely right to press home the point about the unattractiveness of Così fan tutte's group of solipsists. A mirror is the star of the show as a result. No one can escape it. Fiordiligi (Sally Matthews) falls for Read more ...
james.woodall
Antonio Pappano (b. 1959) enjoys the best of two opulent worlds. At the Royal Opera House in London (now his home city), he's well stuck in to his seventh season as music director, basking in popularity and plaudits previous incumbents could only have dreamt of. In Rome, he's director of the Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, a post he took up in 2005. The orchestra, over 100 years old - the Accademia itself goes back to the 1580s - is based at an extraordinary Renzo Piano-designed structure, called the Auditorium Parco della Musica, a couple of kilometres north of the Read more ...
theartsdesk
No great new movements or radically transformational figures emerged to dominate classical music in the Noughties (not even him up there). Just one small nagging question bedevilled us: will the art form survive? Well, it has. What appeared to be a late 20th-century decline in audience interest in the classical tradition was in fact a consumer weariness with the choices on offer. And who could blame them? At the start of this decade, the London orchestral scene, in the hands of aging, mediocre conductors, was as appealing as a boil-in-the-bag fish dinner; administratively and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Very few of the staged goings-on in Covent Garden’s revival production of La Bohème this weekend rose above the level of mediocrity. The singing was blighted by illness and Eastern European bad habits. The 1970s set was as fresh as a fridge full of condemned meats. The 1970s vision of 19th century costume was extraordinary, as if the set of Abigail's Party had been emptied over the singers' heads. And yet, what an enjoyable evening. In the pit, the never resting hands of the Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons was whipping this warhorse into some sort of damn appealing shape. Read more ...
David Nice
Seeking the snows of yesteryear, I remember a time when John Schlesinger's Covent Garden Rosenkavalier filled every moment of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's rococo libretto and Richard Strauss's jewel-studded score with life and meaning. 25 years on, its creator is no more, a revival director (Andrew Sinclair) fails to pull a dramatically variable cast together and many startling new productions have shown more readiness to engage with the opera's Viennese time machine - that's to say, any era between the 1740s and the present day - and with greater panache.A strictly period Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A delicious new treat is promised at The Royal Opera House for Christmas: a comic opera by Tchaikovsky that brings the wit and fun of a Russian magical folk tale to the stage in a staging of rare opulence. A story of turbulent love, magical rides through the sky with the Devil, and an impossible task - to get a peasant girl a pair of Catherine the Great's slippers - The Tsarina's Slippers has ballets and Cossack dancing as well as a host of singing characters.Director Francesca Zambello, costume designer Tatiana Noginova and choreographer Alastair Marriott here reveal their preparations, and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A new production by The Royal Opera of Tchaikovsky's The Tsarina's Slippers opens on Friday at Covent Garden, directed by Francesca Zambello, designed by Mikhail Mokrov and Tatiana Noginova, and with an all-Russian cast of principals conducted by Alexandr Polianichko. Read Ismene Brown's interviews with the creative team elsewhere, and enjoy this feast of design models, costume sketches and production photographs.Click on a picture to enter full view and the slideshow.Sets by Mikhail Mokrov[bg|/OPERA/ismene_brown/tsarinas_slippers/sets]Costume designs by Tatiana NoginovaCharacters: Vakula, a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Will UK Gold now be permanently available at the Royal Opera House? Or was Italian TV being beamed into the auditorium last night by mistake? The 1970s scene before us actually just meant the return of Richard Jones’s inspired sitcom treatment of Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi to Covent Garden. Even before the curtain had lifted we were raising a 1970s titter, being prepped for a return to that decade of naughty slap and tickle with an enormous front cloth image of a Viz-like pair of breasts, bursting from their polka-dotted bust darts. In L’Heure Espagnole, we Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Buoyed by winning the Classic FM Innovation award at Friday's Classic FM Gramophone Awards for its cut-price ticket offer for Sun readers, the Royal Opera House was at it again last night with the return of Francesca Zambello's production of Carmen. There was even a short speech from Deborah Bull, welcoming the Sun contingent to the house while, of course, reminding everyone to turn off their mobile phones. For anybody making a first trip to Covent Garden, this would have been a cracking choice. Not only was there Roberto Alagna making his house debut as Don Jose, but also the Read more ...