Longborough has its Mozart (this season a not wildly exciting Così fan tutte), and it has its Verdi (this year Falstaff). But its real heart is in Wagner, and in particular The Ring, now – in its third year – up to Siegfried. Wagnerites infest the car parks and the picnic lawns. The man who borrowed our corkscrew at supper time had seen six operas in one week at Bayreuth, and on his one night off had gone to Munich to see Rienzi, the longest Wagner night of the lot. Longborough is decidedly his kind of place.
opera reviews
philip radcliffe
The Hallé Orchestra, enlarged for the occasion with harps, anvils, horns and such, was in its place on the platform. Sir Mark Elder made his entrance like a surgeon about to embark on a complex and energy-draining heart bypass operation. And the lights went out. On purpose. A spotlight picked up a man in a white shirt with long hair mounting the platform and making his way to a small table, chair and reading lamp mid-stage. It was Richard Wagner – in the form of actor Roger Allam. Pure melodrama.
igor.toronyilalic
Rossini's William Tell has to be the most well-known unknown opera ever written. There's unlikely to be a man, woman or dog on the planet who can't whistle or bark a part of the overture. But the other four hours? What of that? One opera aficionado told me that the last time he'd heard the whole thing live, Winston Churchill was still in Number 10. Prommers were being given their first chance last night. It was hard not to come to it with trepidation.
stephen.walsh
“These premises have 24-hour security surveillance,” reads one of the notices on the wall as we audience traipsed round the outside of Cardiff’s Coal Exchange between stages of this mobile production of Stephen Deazley’s new opera about people who can’t sleep. It turned out to be the only poster that had nothing to do with the performance, in among the “Nobody Sleeps” signs, the “Keep Awake”s, the “No Beds” (or whatever: “Nessun dorma” I didn’t see or hear, but might have done; it would have been thematic and does in fact crop up in the libretto).
David Nice
After a heap of ashen revivals, it was time for the Royal Opera to take us to the ball in style. Which it does, for the most part. Of course, Massenet's "fairytale after Perrault" isn't Aida, Butterfly, Fidelio, Macbeth orTosca, all of which have deserved better from the house. Though spun out at less than heavenly length and, sometimes, so much per yard, it does have the composer's special brands of discreet charm and gentle humour, especially well served by two world-class voices out of the four leads.
alexandra.coghlan
With opera houses in Britain now ringing to the four-letter cries of Anna Nicole and Two Boys (not to mention the rather more elderly, but no less explicit utterances of Le grand macabre) verbal taboos it seems are a thing of the past. Yet one word remains tainted, perpetually and immutably filthy, never to be voiced in polite cultural company: operetta. Whether or not Puccini’s La rondine actually falls into this genre is debatable, but like the heroine at its heart we shouldn’t allow this silken embrace of a work to be tarnished by a label, however obscene.
alexandra.coghlan
Across the country children may be breaking up for their summer holidays, but in opera land the bell has rung and it’s back to school for all. Following close on the scuffed brogues of Christopher Alden’s schoolyard A Midsummer Night’s Dream at ENO comes Robert Carsen’s new Rinaldo for Glyndebourne. Exchanging Crusader quests for dormitory pranks and trysts behind the bike sheds, it’s a production that undercuts one of Handel’s more pompous scores with humour just exuberant and infectious enough to deliver it from cynicism.
Across the country children may be breaking up for their summer holidays, but in opera land the bell has rung and it’s back to school for all. Following close on the scuffed brogues of Christopher Alden’s schoolyard A Midsummer Night’s Dream at ENO comes Robert Carsen’s new Rinaldo for Glyndebourne. Exchanging Crusader quests for dormitory pranks and trysts behind the bike sheds, it’s a production that undercuts one of Handel’s more pompous scores with humour just exuberant and infectious enough to deliver it from cynicism.
stephen.walsh
The funny thing about updating is how old-fashioned it can seem. Perhaps that’s why opera directors “update” to the Fifties, building in their own obsolescence. Steven Berkoff didn’t deliberately do this (I suppose) in his Oedipus play Greek; yet behind the interminable shits and fucks, the inyerface monkey farts, the snot and the vomit, there does lurk a rather touching aproned and flat-capped mum-and-dad Family Favourites world that was certainly long dead by 1980, when the play was first done. And it’s one of the strong points of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s 1988 opera that it preserves all the essentials of the play but seems less of a period piece.
alexandra.coghlan
Spitalfields Summer Music Festival is now finished for another year, but bid farewell to its audiences in fitting style with We Are Shadows – a new community opera devised by composer John Barber and librettist Hazel Gould. Bringing together over 200 local participants, whether as singers and performers or working behind the scenes to usher this two-year project to fruition, it’s a show that celebrates not only the talents of the Spitalfields community, but also that most universal of London icons: the rat.
igor.toronyilalic
Directors of Madama Butterfly are spoilt for choice when it comes to visual imagery. At their disposal are the vast aesthetic resources of at least one, or, if they're clever, two great cultural superpowers. Thus, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's Ikea-raid from 2003 (quite unbelievably returning to the Royal Opera House last night for a fourth time) isn't so much disappointing as criminally negligent. As the dozen or so identikit Japanese blinds (I'll give them £2.50 for the lot) lower their white screens to the sound of their own electronic humming chorus on Pinkerton's arrival in Nagasaki, all eyes were on debuting Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais. Could she add some colour to this pasty-faced production?