Opera
igor.toronyilalic
How silly an armchair looks in the Royal Albert Hall - like a rubber duck floating in the Pacific. Yet how right it was for those behind this excellent semi- staged Proms performance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande to try to recreate a bit of fin-de-siècle intimacy for this most intensely intimate of operas. And how appropriate also for there to be a couch on stage in a work that is, and has always been, a psychoanalyst's dream.But it wasn't just the furniture that suggested that we were being given entry to an interior world. Everything about the way this symbolist drama played Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Following the three home-grown opera productions, in come the visitors. And so we come to the “other” Figaro, the one by the 18th-century Portuguese composer, Marcos Portugal. This being Buxton and the visiting company being Bampton Classical Opera, fellow-travellers in reviving neglected later 18th-century works, Mozart would be just too, well, common. It’s not all that long ago that we had the “other” Barber of Seville, the Paisiello version here. And we have had several helpings of Cimarosa over the years, from The Secret Marriage to The Italian Girl in London.Marking the 250th anniversary Read more ...
David Benedict
There are no two ways about this: Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece. The plotting is so thrillingly concise, the cunningly built-up musical passion so astonishingly detailed that there simply is no excuse for an underpowered or melodramatic production. But for the last 20 years, the Royal Opera and English National Opera have offered up one flawed – I’m being kind - production after another. Enter director Daniel Slater. His thrillingly intelligent Opera Holland Park production trounces them all.From the moment the overture begins it’s clear there’s a controlling intelligence at work. To Read more ...
David Nice
Pardon the anomaly of a lightly browned-up Latvian Moor married to a German-Greek beauty. This, after all, is not Shakespeare’s play but Verdi’s opera, for which all too few are born to sing heroic tenor Otello and lyric-dramatic soprano Desdemona. Great singing from Aleksandrs Antonenko and great everything from Anja Harteros vindicate Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano’s decision to give Elijah Moshinsky’s 25-year-old production a proud place in the World Shakespeare Festival and to mix finesse with power in realizing every facet of this astonishing score.The framework still holds Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Many years ago in Helsinki I met Sibelius’s daughter, Margareta, and her husband, the conductor Jussi Jalas. He used to come to Manchester to conduct the Halle. And it was he who rescued from obscurity his father-in-law’s only completed opera, The Maiden in the Tower, composed in 1896. This he did in 1981 on Finnish radio, not long before he died. I can’t help thinking how thrilled he would have been to know that the work was at last receiving its UK premiere at the Buxton Festival.It is linked in a unique double bill with another neglected one-act opera, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kashchkei the Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Handel, a national hero at the time, went blind writing Jephtha, his last great oratorio, and sadly thence into terminal decline. Now, 260 years after its first performance at Covent Garden, we have a new production by Frederic Wake-Walker, who is also responsible for the design. So, it’s very much his show.Being an oratorio, Jephtha wasn’t written to be staged. So, what do you do? After all, the story is about a man with ambition whose success on the battlefield brings him national acclaim but personal tragedy. You could go traditional or modern. Or make him a character recognisable in today Read more ...
philip radcliffe
No sooner had the Olympic torch been run out of town than in rushed the cavalcade of opera singers, musicians, actors, dancers and literary talkers for the start of the 34th Buxton Festival. Leading them, so to speak, was Stephen Barlow, the new Artistic Director. Nothing daunted, he decided to take up the baton for the opening night.The tradition here is to surprise us with works from opera’s old curiosity shop. Even if we’ve heard of them, we may well not have seen them, sometimes prompting the ironical “I wonder why?” Not the case with Intermezzo, but we have the double bill of Sibelius’s Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It's amazing how long it takes to realise that we're in the 1970s in Michael Grandage's new Glyndebourne production of Le nozze di Figaro. The mansion house suggests that we're in the 18th century. The light and latticework says we're in Mozart's original Seville. The poor villagers that scurry about during the overture preparing the stage for visitors could be from pretty much anywhere Mediterranean and from any century. It's only when the Count rolls up in a 70s sports car, wearing a concorde collar and flares, that it really dawns on us that we are in the decade of free love. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Riding the same wave of affectionate, riotously melancholic Englishness which carried Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem to success, Damon Albarn’s Dr Dee is dark enough to delight even the most cynical of Jubilee naysayers, gorgeous enough in its national pageantry to crown the cultural celebrations of this landmark year.Originally seen at last year’s Manchester International Festival (a reliable promise of good things). the show has been reworked for its Coliseum staging, and if the result is little clearer in its hallucinatory narrative, its confusion remains as compelling, as black-magical as Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Janáček’s obsession with Russia has always intrigued me: something to do with a shared Slav ancestry traceable to peasant roots being crunched to pieces by the modern world. Gone are the rolling paragraphs and the vast, empty fields and sky. In Katya Kabanova everyone is hemmed in by ancient attitudes and superstitions, and the music, with its abrupt, laconic gestures, is a part of the prison. The work’s most characteristic phrase is Katya’s helpless, repeated “There’s something else I wanted to tell you,” and its typical moment Kudryash’s useless attempt to explain lightning conductors to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Les Troyens is one of music's mythical beasts. The greatest opera that few will have ever seen. Until recently the epic was considered so demanding that it was thought unstageable. David McVicar's new production for the Royal Opera House is only the second in its history. So for most of us last night will have been the first chance to witness the five-hour masterpiece in its original French. It is amid the murmuring woodwinds that the most memorable musical truth of Troyens is to be foundBeyond the fact that the cast is huge, however, (the opera house were fielding the largest Read more ...
theartsdesk
The Arts Desk has been voted Specialist Journalism Site of 2012 at the Online Media Awards. In a celebratory dinner at Arsenal's Emirates Stadium recognising "the best and boldest of online news-based creativity and also the most original", The Guardian were the major winners with five awards, but even their new Data Store section was outgunned in the Specialist Journalism category by The Arts Desk.In a category contested by 11 nominees, The Arts Desk's prize was the first of two given by the judges acclaiming two specialist sites "for very different reasons" - the other went to The Economist Read more ...