Opera
Boyd Tonkin
Reader, I confess that I entered the dark space of Pélleas et Mélisande at Snape Maltings with a prior conviction: that, although musicians adore (for the best of reasons) Debussy’s sole completed opera, audiences sometimes simply endure it. However, strongly singers and orchestra (here, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with Ryan Wigglesworth) convey this dense-woven tapestry of suffering, foreboding and confinement, the first half especially can make listeners echo Pélleas’s cry down in the airless vaults where Golaud drags him: “I’m suffocating.” Wigglesworth, his wholly committed Read more ...
David Nice
The conundrum of five women, three of them men, is the same as it was in the last Serse I witnessed, in the more intimate surroundings of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Paula Murrihy then sang the role of Arsamene, playing brother to Emily D'Angelo's Xerxes and lover to Lucy Crowe's Romilda. Now she's the imperious, capricious ruler to the life, totally different from D'Angelo's but just as valid. The only comparative shortcoming was that compared to Harry Bicket getting bite from The English Concert, Laurence Cummings had the Academy of Ancient Music play sprightly principal boy rather than fiery Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
William Kentridge’s production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo marks a double début at Glyndebourne – neither the director nor the opera, considered by many to be the first proper example of the genre, have appeared here before. Kentridge – who made his name as an artist chronicling oppressive power structures in South Africa – now takes on the ultimate oppressive power of Death, turning the story of Orpheus into an account shimmering with anguished hopes and thwarted possibilities. Kentridge’s distinctive style of animation – a continuous process of drawing pictures in charcoal, then rubbing Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Never have I had such a day,” sings the baffled Emperor Tito as he wearily forgives all and sundry for their conspiracies, treacheries, deceits, attempted murders – and, by the way, for trashing the Capitol long before Trumpian thugs had the same idea. At which point the Grange Festival audience, forgivably, laughs. Mozart’s farewell opera seria from 1791, La Clemenza di Tito presents such a high-minded tableau of imperial nobility and forbearance that we can lose sight of its closeness at some points to utter, Marriage of Figaro-level, farce. Tito’s breakneck shifts Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The first question is always: Don Carlos or Don Carki? Verdi’s opera was originally composed for Paris in 1867, in French, with the requisite five acts and the inevitable ballet. For Milan in 1884 he reduced this to four acts, dropping the whole of the first act and the ballet, and making substantial revisions to what remained, as well as of course translating the libretto into Italian. There were many tinkerings in between.Jo Davies’s production, made for the Hampshire Grange Park Opera a decade ago and now revived for the second time at the Surrey Grange Park, opts (somewhat unfashionably) Read more ...
David Nice
Spirit of place first: Nevill Holt, which I was visiting for the first time, is a beauty. There's an Oxford college look about the facades, from 13th century to more recent additions, a lawn on the hill gives splendid views over the Welland Valley, while gardens and catering rival Glyndebourne and Garsington. Plus, most significantly, a purpose-built, RIBA award-winning 400-seater opera house in the handsome ironstone stable block (pictured below). All of these thanks to David Ross, an entrepreneur with a chequered history whose attention to detail is phenomenal. He bought the estate Read more ...
David Nice
If you find endless riches in Hugo von Hofmannsthal's words and Richard Strauss's score for their "Comedy for Music", as I do, you'll be very happy to catch Bruno Ravella's deliciously staged fantasy again. This was my third time. It had a difficult birth at Garsington during the Covid era - no touching for the 32-year-old Marschallin and her 17-year-old lover Octavian in the opening bedroom scene - then went to Dublin, where Irish National Opera had assembled a remarkable cast with three Irish leading ladies. A fourth, Niamh O'Sullivan, is central in making this Garsington revival a glowing Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
There’s only one thing harder than trying to get to Kings Place to see a semi-staged Dido and Aeneas on the day of Arsenal’s victory parade through north London, and that’s trying to get home again afterwards. It took me longer to get from the venue to sitting on a tube than it did for Dido to go from being a happy singleton to tragically dead. As I battled closed stations and a wall of red shirts and a ticking clock, I experienced something of Dido’s despair, and felt similarly cursed.But it was worth the trip, for a beautifully played and sung performance of Purcell’s groundbreaking opera, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Benvenuti a Napoli cries the huge corny poster of the blue bay and ominous Vesuvius that looms over Neil Irish’s sets for Così fan tutte. However, we’re no longer in the Enlightenment city of cynical male experiments in female psychology where Mozart and Da Ponte’s opera of 1790 first took place. Now, in the 1950s stage of post-1945 America’s forever wars, Naples-posted US Marines Guglielmo and Ferrando meet up with long-distance sweethearts Fiordiligi and Dorabella after a transatlantic flight. Elizabeth Karani’s multi-tasking Despina serves as runway signaller as the arriving passengers Read more ...
David Nice
A libertine who deserves punishment makes a good/bad start when a male director decides he really has tried to rape Donna Anna, and doesn't just enjoy post-coital badinage with her. Tom Creed thankfully begs to differ from, say, Kasper Holten – hard to believe that Don Giovanni is due for revival in the coming Royal Opera season – or Ole Anders Tandberg at the Royal Swedish Opera (toilets à la Bieito, whose ENO Giovanni was a horrible mess - there's only one, and only briefly, on the Lismore stage). The era of "she wanted it really" is over, and Creed's good folk are vocally the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“La bohème, Tosca, Butterfly: you just know where you are with them, don’t you?” If the bar-chat at the opening night of the Opera Holland Park 30th anniversary season was anything to go by then La fanciulla del West still has its work cut out to make it onto the podium of Puccini all-stars. But the composer’s Western not-quite-tragedy (three cheers for a heroine still live and very much kicking by the final curtain) has a delicious score flecked rich with melodic gold, and just enough celluloid silliness to keep things entertaining.Anyone who still remembers Opera Holland Park’s most Read more ...
David Nice
Bellini's most consistently inspired opera, director Orpha Phelan tells us, has been set on a pedestal. Well, a pedestal would have been good for the titular Druid high priestess to deliver her celebrated invocation, a moon, perhaps some trees for the sacred wood, a chorus standing still in a semicircle. Traditional? Yes, but so is the shallow window-dressing for a rather interesting love-triangle. Though there's a splendid bellicose chorus, taken at a terrific lick here, Phelan goes in hard on the war aspect by setting the whole thing in a ruined church, post-apocalypse (she writes), with Read more ...