Opera
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
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 ...
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 ...
Boyd Tonkin
Literally the first masterpiece of the 20th century (premiered on 14 January 1900), Tosca has had to wait until the second quarter of the 21st to arrive on the Glyndebourne stage. That delay tells you much about Glyndebourne, and about the lingering odour of distaste and even revulsion that for a long time hung in polite operatic circles around Puccini’s “shabby little shocker”.This political melodrama makes its gorgeous tunes shine against a gruesome backdrop of power, pain and fear. Director Ted Huffman (on his Glyndebourne debut) must contend both with audience expectations about a Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It began with a Gothic funeral procession. A drum beat ominously as a line of figures with shabby black suits, whitened faces, and jagged mascara around hollow staring eyes walked solemnly through the audience. We were sat in the dry dock of the Cutty Sark, dominated by the historic ship’s elegant copper-clad hull suspended three metres in the air, a permanent reminder that this would end with Aeneas’s departure across the sea. Ahead of us, the museum’s cluster of ship figureheads – including Disraeli and Elizabeth Fry – formed a simultaneously colourful and sinister backdrop to the drama Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Sometimes operas – even immensely powerful ones – simply don’t make complete sense, and we can see why Dr Johnson dismissed the form as an “exotic and irrational entertainment”. Then again, that sounds fun, and also a fair description of much of Saint-Saëns’s Biblical blockbuster Samson et Dalila. At Covent Garden, in this comeback for Richard Jones’s 2022 production (with Benjamin Davis as revival director), the exotic parts certainly shine. None more so than the nuanced, heartfelt duo of SeokJong Baek as the love-struck Hebrew hero and Aigul Akhmetshina as his Philistine seducer. That’ Read more ...
Robert Beale
There are three aspects of English National Opera’s most ambitious project to date in Manchester that demand attention.One is the work itself: Royce Vavrek and Du Yun’s Pulitzer Prize winning Angel’s Bone, seen as an outstanding creative work of 10 years ago, now getting its UK premiere. The second is the artistic achievement of inter-city musical collaboration bringing it to life in Aviva Studios’ “warehouse” space, where boundary-breaking comes as standard. The third is the approach of director Kip Williams (whose UK opera debut this is), designer Marg Horwell and their team, offering it as Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head.” And so it proves. Benjamin Britten’s fisherman Peter Grimes is damned before a note is sung – condemned not by a judge, but by his own community. Deborah Warner’s brutal 2022 staging, now back at the Royal Opera for its first revival, never lets us forget this. We don’t even see a courtroom. Instead, the Prologue plays out as a hallucinatory fantasy, a fever-dream in the mind of Grimes himself: his dead apprentice haunts his thoughts, while a mob of dark figures circle like hounds. Grimes is a tragedy of alienation, but this staging Read more ...
David Nice
It all adds up to a cleverly interconnected triple bill and the perfect experience for five singers from the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Artists Programme. There are three losses, two of them deaths, only one mourned for, a baritone in all three operas and three other singers in two of them, plus dazzling, finely honed work from various small forces of the Britten Sinfonia under conductor Peggy Wu (also on the JPAP). The weak link has nothing to do with any of the performances, nor Talia Stern's surefooted direction, so let's get that out of the way first. I'd be surprised if Elizabeth Read more ...