Opera
Ismene Brown
Henry Goodman, Imelda Staunton and Aidan McArdle won the big acting prizes while Akram Khan and Opera North carried off the dance and opera gongs at the annual Theatrical Management Association awards - now called Theatre Awards UK. Held yesterday at the medieval Guildhall in the City of London, the awards highlight the best of theatre, dance and opera in Britain's touring theatres selected by panels of critics. They attracted a small red carpet of press photographers as eminences such as Howard Brenton, Michael Ball, Janie Dee, Culture Minister Ed Vaizey, Timothy West and Prunella Scales Read more ...
graham.rickson
Has any other composer managed to pack so much into such a compact time span? You’d recognise this score as vintage Janáček after hearing just a few seconds – those yawning gaps between muted tuba and piccolo, the frantic, unforgiving string writing. Minimalist motifs scurry, circle, always on the verge of delivering an exultant peroration, which, frustratingly, rarely materializes. The Makropulos Case is full of music like this. Disappointment evaporates quickly as the next orgiastic climax builds. It’s exasperating, exhilarating, and feels completely appropriate for the plot of this black Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Don Giovanni – Coming Soon” winked and nudged the publicity posters for English National Opera’s latest production. And just in case the entendre wasn’t clear they added a picture of a condom. Playful, provocative and just a little bit sordid, it captured the spirit of Mozart’s damaged seducer with singular accuracy. Too bad the revival of Rufus Norris’s 2012 production, though much changed since we last saw it, is still about as enticing as a second-hand sex toy.Jeremy Sams has written a brilliant contemporary libretto – less a translation and more a free reworking of Da Ponte’s text. The Read more ...
graham.rickson
You leave Opera North’s new Faust buzzing and bleary-eyed. The production sounds glorious, with terrific singing. It’s also blessed and cursed with a visually astonishing staging which thrills only slightly more than it infuriates. This company’s cheeky Carmen update annoyed many in 2011, and their take on "the second most popular French opera" will leave some spectators perplexed.Ran Arthur Braun and Rob Kearley’s updating is broadly contemporary but full of anachronistic details – the chorus could pass for Mad Men extras, though gazing at iPads and occasionally filming proceedings on their Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Confinement is a thread running through English Touring Opera’s autumn season. In Albert Herring it is in the priggish village; in The Emperor of Atlantis it is in the circumstances of its creation within the Terezín concentration camp; in The Lighthouse, it is one room with curved walls and the interminable wait for the relief ship.This 1979 chamber opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, who also wrote the libretto, is based on real events: in 1900 a supply ship stopping at the lighthouse on a tiny Outer Hebridean island found it in good shape but deserted, with no sign of its three keepers. The Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Victor Ullmann’s 1943 opera The Emperor of Atlantis never made it beyond a dress rehearsal during the composer’s tragically curtailed lifetime. Composed in the Terezín concentration camp, this operatic satire is a work of exquisite bravery – a musical credo and shout of defiance that backs humanity in the face of overwhelming odds. It’s also an exuberant magpie score, where the composer’s ear for jazz, cabaret, neo-classical pastiche and dance tunes shows its inventive skill.After disappearing until the 1970s, the work is enjoying something of a revival in London at the moment. A fringe Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Albert Herring probably doesn’t make the top five most performed of Britten’s operas, yet is easily the best known work in English Touring Opera’s brave Autumn season – the other two are Viktor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis and Peter Maxwell Davies’ The Lighthouse.Britten’s "country comedy" is light-hearted but it displays similar preoccupations to Peter Grimes and Billy Budd – insularity, groupthink, innocence and a hero who doesn’t fit in. Overall, ETO gave a compelling production with very effective direction from Christopher Rolls. The characterisation in the piece is fairly two- Read more ...
stephen.walsh
For some reason, the Welsh have revived their Così fan tutte, from last year, with positively unseemly haste – if not quite so unseemly as the haste with which their La Bohème, from this spring, was wheeled back on last month barely three months after its first airing. It looks as if the outgoing intendant John Fisher, never notable for lively repertory planning, was either clearing his desk, or had simply scarpered. His successor, David Pountney, has bravely been much in evidence on company first nights this year, but cannot yet be blamed for what he, and we, are hearing and seeing.This Così Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There's no guaranteed route to success with contemporary opera but, ever since Nixon in China, topicality and realism have become the most favoured and trusted paths to some kind of favourable outcome. Two chamber operas, receiving their English premiere at the Linbury Studio Theatre on the weekend, joined this ever-expanding modern school of verismo. Huw Watkins, who moonlights as one of the finest young pianists of his generation, delivered the first, In the Locked Room. This 50-minute work, scored in a very reserved, very English way, offers us a simple domestic melodrama shot through Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Samuel Johnson’s description of opera as an exotic and irrational entertainment might well have been written after a performance of Borodin’s Prince Igor, give or take a hundred years or so. Of all great operas – and it is one – this must be one of the most colourful and most confused. Which is no doubt why it is very seldom staged, and why I thought it worthwhile to go to Hamburg to catch up with David Pountney’s new production at the Staatsoper in the city of Brahms, who was born in the same year as Borodin and never even tried to write an opera. Borodin, by contrast, tried for 18 years, Read more ...
David Nice
Dissatisfied housewives who eventually stand by their men joined jewelled hands in a divine evening of operatic decadence. Suppressed Bianca all but steps over the body of her strangled lover to get at the muscles of her killer husband in Zemlinsky’s A Florentine Tragedy, taking its cue from the deep purple imagery of Oscar Wilde’s story. And in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow), the Dyer’s Wife readily gives up her dreams of sacrificing motherhood and taking up with a fantasy toyboy when domestic violence looms. Dodgy premises both, and unlikely subjects Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reviewing the Buxton Festival production of Handel’s Jephtha on theartsdesk a couple of months ago, Philip Radcliffe complained that the director, Frederic Wake-Walker, had done too little to justify the staging of this, the composer’s last oratorio: had made it, that is, too static and unstagey. I wonder what Radcliffe would say about Katie Mitchell’s production for Welsh National Opera, revived this weekend by Robin Tebbutt, and a classic case of a director’s reluctance to allow an essentially statuesque, slow-moving work its natural space and pace.Unlike Wake-Walker, who virtually Read more ...