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.
opera reviews
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?
igor.toronyilalic
Nico Muhly had one humble aim for his first opera. He wanted to create an episode of Prime Suspect, he told me last week. "A grand opera that functions as a good night's entertainment." There's no doubt he's achieved that. Two Boys, receiving its world premiere last night at the English National Opera, is as gripping an operatic thriller as any ever penned. But is there more to the work than that?
The opera tackles the great themes of our age: the internet, youth corruptibility, sexual coming of age.
alexandra.coghlan
It’s the oldest coup de théâtre in the postmodernist playbook – the curtain rises to reveal an audience staring back at us – but still, in the opening seconds of Willy Decker’s Peter Grimes, one of the most effective. Our theatrical doubles here are sinister creatures indeed, massed rows of sombre Victorians whose brutal Christianity is no less severe than the angles of John Macfarlane’s set. As gazes meet across the courtroom in that moment we confront ourselves, discover ourselves in the folk of the Borough, implicated absolutely in their tragedy.
alexandra.coghlan
With so many of the premieres and rediscoveries of the summer opera season coming from the bel canto repertoire, it’s lovely to see Garsington Opera striking out in a different direction. Following on from last year’s L'Incoronazione di Dario (and culminating aptly next year in L’Olimpiade), the company this year offer up that exotic rarity La verità in cimento – a middle-period Vivaldi opera, behind the veil of whose unfamiliar title are hiding a harem of flashing-eyed arias and seductive orchestral writing.
stephen.walsh
Imagine you are at a study day being run by Friends of the Earth. They mount a play in which a group of angels who somehow got left out of the Book of Genesis fall to a completely barren earth, look around, and start reconstructing, re-enacting its life and death. They plant, grow, overgrow, eat, overeat; they tell themselves the earth will always be fruitful, but they’re mistaken. In the end two of the angels become Adam and Eve and walk off hand in hand into a ruined landscape lit by the rising sun. Then Luke Bedford sets it all to music.
graham.rickson
After years of planning, Opera North's Ring cycle gets under way. The orchestra pit at the Leeds Grand Theatre is too small for Wagner's oversized orchestra. So this is a concert staging, to be repeated in the coming months at The Sage Gateshead, Birmingham's Symphony Hall and The Lowry in Salford. It's really a blessing, meaning that production staff don't have to grapple with Wagner's extravagant stage demands in order to make the impossible appear tangible. What Opera North have done is engage lighting designer Peter Mumford to create a concert staging.
igor.toronyilalic
The Barbican committed a grave sin last night. It forgot that people matter more than art. That their responsibility to the families of those who Jack Unterweger (the subject of John Malkovich's music drama, The Infernal Comedy) murdered trumps any interest in the dramatic potential of Unterweger's bizarre life. However constraining to the autonomy of creativity this may be, these are the rules of common decency. A portrait of Ratko Mladić that did little to show the horror of his crimes and much to convey what a loveable rogue he was would be a disgrace.
stephen.walsh
The extraordinary Longborough Opera Festival is with us again and for the next six weeks, in Martin and Lizzie Graham’s Palladian barn theatre near Stow-on-the-Wold. This year the world’s unlikeliest Ring cycle reaches Siegfried. But the improbability doesn’t end with Wagner; there is also Verdi (Falstaff) and Mozart – also, typically, a cyclic project, which has arrived at Così fan tutte. The whole set-up is so amazing that one longs to be enthusiastic about everything. But that can sometimes be difficult.
David Nice
Its little-mermaid legend is enough to make the angels weep, given the bewitching gravity of Dvořák's masterpiece: a water nymph, caught between the human and supernatural worlds, condemns herself to eternal limbo for the sake of her erring princely lover.