Royal Opera
Jessica Duchen
Goethe’s Die Leiden des junges Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was a vital spark in the ignition of the German romantic movement. The story of a young man driven to kill himself for love of a woman, Charlotte, who loves him but marries someone else out of duty to her family, it was first published in 1774. It triggered a fever across Europe ranging from fashion trends (Werther wears blue with a yellow waistcoat) to a spate of copycat suicides. Among its admirers were Beethoven, Brahms, Napoleon and Frankenstein’s Monster. Strange that the only operatic version is by Jules Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Kasper Holten left a mixed bag of productions behind at Royal Opera when he left in 2017, but the best of them - though not all my colleagues on The Arts Desk have agreed - is this Don Giovanni, now back for its latest revival.Visually, the production is stunning. The set (designer Es Devlin) is a full-sized house, onto which videos are projected (video designer Luke Halls). The house rotates, and the projections follow, a high-tech effect that manages to keep the eye tricked for the entire length of the opera. The two storeys of the house create a double-tier set. The action typically takes Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
On paper, this might seem like a revival too far, a production clearly intended as a vehicle for world-class singers being tacked on the end of the Covent Garden season, and without any big names in sight. But it turns out that Laurent Pelly’s staging, now in its fourth London return, has enough charm and substance to justify an outing with lesser names. And the revival cast is certainly competent, with no obvious weak links, and a sense of ensemble that keeps the hackneyed plot ticking over and the light comedy just on the right side of cliché.The production was designed for big stages – it Read more ...
David Nice
Suppose you're seeing Musorgsky's selective historical opera for the first time in Richard Jones's production, without any prior knowledge of the action. That child's spinning-top on the dropcloth: why? Then the curtain rises and we see Bryn Terfel's troubled Boris Godunov seated in near-darkness, while a figure with an outsized head plays with a real top in the upper room before being swiftly despatched by three assassins. The playback repetitions are the thing to catch the conscience of the tsar-king. Later, chronicler-monk Pimen gives us the back-story about the murder of the heir-apparent Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Singer Ian Bostridge once described The Diary of One who Disappeared as “a song cycle gone wrong”. But this reimagining of it as an opera, by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, also goes wrong, throwing in various extras which detract from rather than enhance the piece’s impact. I am no stranger to being baffled in an opera house. In fact, I tend to feel that if an opera passes without any confusion there’s something wrong. But here I spent most of the hour of the show unsure what was happening or why.The reframing of a song cycle, originally set in Read more ...
David Nice
Leaving a revival performance of Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a friend asked Hans Werner Henze, also in the audience, that dreaded question: "what did you think?" "Very competent and extremely well performed," came the answer. What snap judgment can one form about Phaedra, his own late mythological fantasia, which also features a bass as the half-man, half-bull, but keeps its labyrinth – in this production, at any rate – to the music and the bizarre wraps around the story of Phaedra's passion for her stepson Hippolytus? Extremely well sung and played by superb young artists, jury out Read more ...
David Nice
On one level, it's about Biblically informed good and evil at sea, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. On another, the love that dared not speak its name when Britten and E M Forster adapted Hermann Melville's novella is either repressed or (putatively) liberated. The conflicts can make for lacerating music theatre, as they did in Orpha Phelan's production for Opera North. Deborah Warner's ideas are there, but yet confused, to the Royal Opera House audience at least, even after runs in Madrid and Rome. In the bows of the ship, Ivor Bolton's conducting is mostly solid, no more, Read more ...
David Nice
While Bach's and Handel's Passions have been driving thousands to contemplate suffering, mortality and grace, this elegy for black lives lost over a century ago also chimes movingly with pre-Easter offerings. First seen in Southampton last year as a commission by 14-18-NOW marking the centenary of the First World War, it relives through song, dance and word the fate of the 618 men of the South African Native Labour Corps who drowned in the English channel when their ship, the SS Mendi, collided with a much larger vessel in thick fog.The very fact that few of us will not even have heard the Read more ...
David Nice
Goethe's cosmic Faust becomes Gounod's operatic fust in what, somewhat surprisingly, remains a repertoire staple. You go for the tunes, hoping for the world-class voices to do them justice and prepared for a pallid quarter-of-an-hour or two. David McVicar's 15-year-old production as revived by Bruno Ravella is beginning to date, Royal Opera trad with a few scandalous add-ons and wacky choreography by Michael Keegan-Dolan. Two things are startling this time round: the conducting of Dan Ettinger, which makes the score sound much more interesting than I remember, and a phenomenon, unique to Read more ...
David Nice
It might be the nature of Handel's operatic beasts, but performances tend to fall into two camps: brilliant in the fusion of drama and virtuosity, singing and playing, or boring to various degrees. If this handsome opening gambit in the 2019 London Handel Festival is a mixture of both, that may be due more to the fact that Berenice is one of the composer's more generic offerings, not in the league of Ariodante or Alcina which also premiered on the Covent Garden site two years earlier (in 1735). Young director Adele Thomas draws a winning and precise physicality from a fine cast, but like so Read more ...
Samir Savant
This is my third year as festival director of the London Handel Festival, an annual celebration of the life and work of composer George Frideric Handel, which takes place every spring in venues across the capital. Our core charitable and artistic objectives for the Festival are to explore the full repertoire of Handel, to bring the composer’s music to broader audiences and to continue his tradition of nurturing young talent. I have always known Handel’s music, having sung it since I was a boy, but it is only in recent years that I have come to discover the complex and loveable character Read more ...
David Nice
When "Maestro" Riccardo Muti left the Royal Opera's previous production of Verdi's fate-laden epic, disgusted by minor changes to fit the scenery on the Covent Garden stage, no-one was sorry when Antonio Pappano, the true master of the house then only two years into his glorious reign, took over. He's now unsurpassable in the pace and colouring of the great Verdi and Puccini scores. Signs from his previous collaborations with once radical director Christof Loy and the glorious cast assembled were that this time round Forza would be a total triumph. In the end, several mountains gave birth to Read more ...