Royal Opera
David Nice
Another season, another new production of Verdi’s nastiest masterpiece. For which we should be profoundly grateful after the tribulations of the last 18 months. Yet how quickly elements of the routine can corrode the soul of the spectator, just as fresh, urgent communication can set it alight.That communication Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano displays with a true magician’s sense of pace and sleight of hand, deftly transitioning from hollow comedy to ugly tragedy, alert as ever to the needs of his soloists, and the Royal Opera men’s chorus is with him all the way. On the other hand Read more ...
David Nice
Instant sell-out would have been guaranteed if the Royal Opera had advertised this as “Cardiff Singer of the World finalist Masabane and fellow Young Artists”. No doubt about it, South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha is indeed the most polished performer, crying out star quality in every move and note. But that’s not the point. These singers have bonded through a difficult year or two, and they all have so much to offer, if also in some cases some way to go.The Royal Opera mentoring culminated on Saturday afternoon in a showcase of operatic scenes where they got to work with Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This isn’t an opera review, because Current, Rising is not an opera. What it is, however, is the most convincing example yet that Virtual Reality arts might not just be possible, but desirable – an experience that glances beyond gimmick towards genuinely new territory.Billed as “the world’s first hyper reality opera”, Current, Rising is a 15-minute, walk-through installation housed in the what the makers have nicknamed the “opera tardis” in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre. The credits give some sense of the scope of a project that brings together a university, software developers, Read more ...
David Nice
It looked as if the Royal Opera might be trying to keep its distance with the first new production since lockdown. After all, Mozart’s last opera – only the Overture and March of the Priests in The Magic Flute remained to be composed in the fatal year of 1791 after the 18 days spent working on Tito – seems to have been fairly minimally staged for Emperor Leopold II's Prague coronation as King of Bohemia. When the composer’s widow Constanze revived the work after his death, it was as a series of concert performances (with Beethoven playing a Mozart concerto between the acts on at least one Read more ...
David Nice
There are so many good ideas, so much talented hard work from the singers of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and two dancers, such a cinematic use of the Royal Opera House, that Isabelle Kettle’s interweaving of two Brecht/Weill mini masterpieces ought to work better than it does. In jettisoning much about the fantastical scenarios of flawed human beings on quests to make or spend money in paradises that turn out to be hells, favouring instead the deconstruction of female and male archetypes, you need to be clear about your intentions, streamline their presentation. Too often here Read more ...
David Nice
Young performers seeking platforms for their careers have had it especially rough over the past year, most slipping through the financial-support net and now facing the further blow of the Brexit visa debacle. So it’s always good to welcome quality streamings supporting their progress. The Royal Opera has kept its Jette Parker Young Artists regularly in the public eye – we’ve got to know and care about many of them – while Barbara Hannigan’s recently-launched Momentum project teams up new talent with more established performers, as happens in the Blackheath/Leeds Lieder Brahms special (three Read more ...
David Nice
So Hansel and Gretel can’t cuddle up together in the dark forest, Musetta doesn’t fall into long-suffering lover Marcello’s arms and there’s no audience to play to (as there would have been three days earlier). No matter: the Christmas-tree-grown-enormous from the stalwart production of The Nutcracker keeps us gaping, the singers young, established and old duly deliver and Mark Wigglesworth elicits sweep and brio from a substantial Royal Opera Orchestra.Up to this point, Royal Opera film presentation in its streamed events has been impeccable. Filming and lighting are once again first rate, Read more ...
David Nice
Throughout this most difficult of years, the Royal Opera has done the right thing for the singers on its Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. They were fortunate to finish the run of Handel’s Susanna before the Linbury Theatre closed down for over seven months (yesterday saw its reopening to a necessarily small audience). Stunning South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha amazed as the heroine, and went on to appear in both the third livestreaming from the main house and as the soloist of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 in the brilliant 4/4 event. Two of the lunchtime singers, Read more ...
David Nice
Think you’ve seen enough of monologues and duets over the past few months? Watch this and reel. Four British directors, four conductors with close ties to the Royal Opera and five singers based here, from South African and Spanish-born sopranos on the house's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and a baritone with youth also very much on his side to a top tenor and mezzo, between them serve up stagings of cantatas and song cycles which work brilliantly as a whole. The curator (three cheers!) is Director of Opera Oliver Mears, while the flawless and evocative designs common to four are by Read more ...
David Nice
What could be better than Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro to celebrate the Royal Opera’s next step on the path out of lockdown? Ideally, the rest of the opera, especially remembering Antonio Pappano’s lively interaction with his singers playing the continuo role. But the unavoidably touchy-feely action, even in a semi-staged performance, still can’t be realized, so what we got on Friday night was a starry(ish) gala instead – always a tricky act to sustain.First, the real cause for celebration: the full Royal Opera Orchestra filling the stalls area and the Chorus in the boxes and Read more ...
David Nice
It’s begun: very limited access to live music, the chance to sit before one or two players in the same room – as we were doing only three and a half months ago, in some cases thousands of us before an orchestra of up to a hundred musicians. When the big symphonies and operas can return is anyone’s guess; there is currently no real light at the end of the tunnel, in the UK at least, given the endless vortex into which governmental indecision and lack of funding have plunged us.Hope begins to fade with lack of a rescue package; without it, even flagships like the Royal Opera House will not be Read more ...
David Nice
Solitude, mortality and transcendence have never been more profoundly expressed in music than by Mahler, who composed Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) in the valley of the shadow of death (too superstitious to give it the name of Ninth Symphony, though that and a sketched-out Tenth did follow, he never lived to hear it performed). It seems like the perfect work to benefit from a silent background in an otherwise empty Royal Opera House - though there's no substitute for the intense silence of a full audience. Gluck, too struck his deepest note with the highest ones of the Read more ...