Opera
Ismene Brown
It should be hard to make Britten’s Billy Budd a bloodless, passionless, contextless bore, shouldn’t it? This is after all a lacerating story about men behaving badly on a fighting ship in the 1797 wars between Britain and Revolutionary France, a story where a man of great viciousness meets a man of much havering and a decent, possibly extraordinary lad loses his life.And yet it’s what David Alden and English National Opera have achieved with this new production. Re-uniting the team who produced a hotly argued-about Peter Grimes in 2009, this has even more the sense of a disconnection between Read more ...
simon.broughton
“Come to the front with those guns. You need to frighten those poor Brits – pah, pah, pah, pah, pah!” Michael Williams hurls his fist forward as if wielding his own weapon as he urges the demonstrators with their sticks and guns forward. The crowd of black singers in front of him are recreating an anti-apartheid protest in Cape Town Opera’s production of Mandela Trilogy, which gets its European premiere in Cardiff on 20 June.Williams is the librettist and director of Mandela Trilogy and managing director of Cape Town Opera. And I’m in the Opera’s rehearsal room in the Artscape in Cape Town to Read more ...
graham.rickson
This works as well as it did last year – a no-frills approach to Wagner that helps far more than it hinders. Forget fat ladies wearing Viking helmets. Here the intimacy, the surprising humanity of Die Walküre come to the fore in what seems more and more like an opera cycle narrating a complex, tragic family saga, focusing on a father’s inability to control his daughters.Practical considerations, namely an orchestra pit too small to accommodate Wagnerian forces, have led Opera North to mount their Ring Cycle as a semi-staged production in Leeds’s spectacular Victorian town hall, after which it Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Zaha Hadid, visionary architect of the London Olympics Aquatic Centre, becomes a Dame and three new knights of the arts are created in the Queen's Jubilee Birthday Honours announced this morning. Actor Kenneth Branagh, long touted as Sir Laurence Olivier's heir in the classical tradition, becomes a Sir, as do Michael Boyd, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and opera director David McVicar.Kate Winslet becomes CBE, as do Sadler's Wells chief Alistair Spalding and composer Michael Berkeley and Harry Christophers, founder of the baroque vocal ensemble The Sixteen.Among the new Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a lovely moment in The Opera Group’s production of Bow Down. An actor motions to a member of the audience and grins bleakly: “He thought he was here for an opera….”. It’s an aside, over before we’ve even fully registered it, but it’s one that reminds us that both Tony Harrison and Harrison Birtwistle knew exactly what they were doing when they constructed this amputated, bleeding limb of a work and christened it an “opera”, back in 1977.It would be hard to imagine two more brusque, pitilessly beautiful artists than Birtwistle and Harrison. From Lancashire and Yorkshire Read more ...
David Benedict
With the obvious exceptions of Verdi’s twin masterpieces Otello and Falstaff, Così fan tutte is the most Shakespearean of operas. Centuries before anyone invented the term, it’s nothing less than opera’s most elegant study in sexual politics. Written with the textural richness and emotional reversals of Much Ado About Nothing, it needs acting/singing performances of true depth in order to succeed. Harry Fehr’s new production adds a framing device of conscious performance, but intriguing though this is, it distracts from true engagement with the heart of the work.Intent upon underlining the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Out-characterising anything on stage last night, London’s weather certainly did its bit to celebrate the start of the Opera Holland Park summer season. No Scottish heath could have been more blasted, no moorland more battered by the wind than we were in the shadow of “Lammermoor Castle” (aka Holland House) for the company’s Lucia di Lammermoor.The backdrop of Holland House – originally built in 1605, and determinedly crenelated and decorated – gives Opera Holland Park’s auditorium its particular character; it’s an unwise director who chooses to ignore it altogether. Seasons past have Read more ...
David Benedict
It has romantic sweep but is held firm by zealous attention to detail and while it’s hugely expansive of gesture, it’s never generalised. I’m talking about Kirill Karabits’ conducting of La bohème at Glyndebourne. I wish I could say the same for the production.If David McVicar’s vision of love among the artists had punch on its first outing in 2000, something has been lost in the translation. Lest we forget that Rodolfo and his chums are unsuccessful, the contemporary setting is self-consciously drab – presumably to support Puccini’s exploration of verismo and off-set the passion of his Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For all but two of its 30 years in business, Garsington Opera has had Mozart in each and every season. He's the nearest this company gets to a resident composer. While everything else at the seasonal operation is in flux, their Mozart is a constant. And as with any long-running relationship, there is a confidence in the coming together of the two of them that usually makes any new Mozart production at Garsington one of the Summer highlights. This year was no exception. We began the night, however, with a cliche. Like many a director before him, Daniel Slater chose to relocate the 18th- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Despite ever-more determined attempts by musicologists to broaden the baroque repertoire of our opera houses, Handel still very much has things his own way. But in this Olympic year a sly challenge has emerged from Antonio Vivaldi’s L’Olimpiade – its topical, Games-themed premise garnering it more performances in a single year than in the past 200 put together. Undeniably apt, unquestionably novel, but is the opera actually any good?Garsington Opera clearly believe so. For them, L’Olimpiade is no stand-alone rarity, but rather the celebratory culmination of a three-year Vivaldi project. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Of all Romantic operas, La Bohème is perhaps the one that responds best to what one might, for want of a better phrase, call straight theatrical treatment. It’s pure genre: no hidden meanings, no contemporary significance. “Scenes from the life”, as Murger called his book, now barely readable. Puccini’s opera, likewise, is short on continuity, long on atmosphere, very long on sentiment. Why would anyone bother with it?Annabel Arden’s new production for WNO answers that question more than convincingly. She makes no great statements; we’re not lectured on art as redemption or disease as moral Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
According to Oscar Wilde’s Salome (and faithfully preserved in Hedwig Lachmann’s libretto), the mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death. That may be so, but neither comes close to equalling the baffling mystery that is still David McVicar’s production. Not trusting the simple reds, moons and veils of Wilde’s stylised original to conjure sufficient horror, McVicar takes his abused heroine to Nazi Germany by way of Pasolini and a backstory of physical and psychological trauma. Then he throws in an abattoir and plenty of blood.To take such abstraction, the allusive possibility Read more ...