Opera
graham.rickson
Revived with almost indecent haste, Jo Davies’s 2010 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore now feels even more polished and slick. Slickness is not a derogatory term here; this staging hits the spot in pretty much every way – musically, dramatically and visually.Davies’s shrewdest move is to shift Gilbert’s creaky satire on the excesses of Victorian melodrama forward to the 1920s, a period now more closely associated with the genre – think silent cinema, big moustaches and shiny top hats. There are also several nice nods to 1930s horror films, and a witty sequence of scratchy slides Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are several types of garden opera, and there are also, happily, several types of cinema opera. You can rustle your Werthers through a relay from the Met and endure the touchy-feely interviews with panting mega-sopranos just out of Verdi’s “Sempre libera”; or you can pick up a small touring company like Mid Wales Opera at the Pontardawe Arts Centre or the Aberdare Coliseum, and watch real opera sung by human beings in unhelpful surroundings. I know which I prefer; but then I have a weakness for adaptability. And this MWO Madam Butterfly, which I caught up with at the Roses Theatre in Read more ...
David Nice
No two creative artists have a stronger right to make a valid statement about Auschwitz than a Polish-born composer who escaped his family's fate by fleeing to Russia, only to fall into another anti-Semitic trap, and a Polish writer whose clear-eyed transmutation of her three years in the camp inspired the opera. Neither, of course, guarantees the end result of great art. But Mieczysław Weinberg, Shostakovich's dearest disciple who died in 1996 without having seen his most cherished project staged, and novelist Zofia Posmysz, an elegant 88-year-old who having attended the Bregenz Festival Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
That Faust - Gounod's curdled Victorian dessert of an opera, an overwhipped melange of melodrama and misogyny, topped with grand 19th-century dollops of religiosity - achieves a level of profundity that at one stage nearly had me in tears is an absolute miracle. The miracle workers? David McVicar, whose revival production is unlikely to be bettered, and a clutch of leads that you'd normally need a pact with the devil - or at least a very amenable bank manager - to bring together.You don't have to update to pack a punch. That's what McVicar's straight-up French Second Empire setting Read more ...
graham.rickson
It’s easy to accuse opera companies in these straitened times of wanting to play safe. Opera North’s 2011-12 season is slightly slimmer than one would expect, but includes five new productions, and the revivals fully deserve their resurrection. Ruddigore is one. Tim Albery’s 1950s update of Madam Butterfly, first performed in 2007, is the other, and it's been given a classy resurrection here.Puccini’s best operas are disarmingly accessible and musically they’re brilliantly constructed. The frighteningly young Italian conductor Daniele Rustioni takes charge for most of these performances Read more ...
ash.smyth
A legend on the operatic stage, Sir John Tomlinson (CBE) has sung with all the major British opera companies, made countless recordings, and for sixteen years was a fixture at Bayreuth, where he performed leading roles in each of Wagner's epic works. Throughout his career he has worked regularly with English National Opera and with The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, where in 2008 he created the title role in Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur.At his home in Sussex, Sir John talks to theartsdesk - in booming Lancashire tones - about getting into Wagner, the importance of a good beard, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
After a summer of operas set in what might tactfully be called fancy locations, it comes as a mild shock to return to Wales and a Don Giovanni that actually takes the composer’s instructions as its starting-point. John Caird, whose first ever production for WNO a few years back was Don Carlos, revisits Spain without a qualm. He gives us heavily embossed ironwork and carved oak, he gives us cowled monks and cloaked aristocrats. And he captures without irony a world in which God and the Devil can be defied but not denied – a world forever teetering on the brink of moral and spiritual Read more ...
ash.smyth
Next week Sir John Tomlinson (b 1946), renowned mega-bass and routine frequenter of the Covent Garden stage, appears in concert at the Windsor Festival. It is a picturesque halt on a career that sees him circling the world's greatest opera houses in the most epic roles in opera. As is typical of this far from typical singer, the concert is huge in its range, encompassing Mozart, Verdi and Wagner, its lyrical portrayals ranging from servants to gods, from priests to cobblers, human conditions of every shade from ruthless to kind.In the first of two interview features this weekend – and fresh Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“An elixir with a kick, sir, one that really packs a punch”, sings Adina in Jonathan Miller’s Midwestern The Elixir of Love, and she couldn’t be more right. A night spent among the floral prints, perky ponytails and pastel wipe-down surfaces of this production is like being battered around the head with a bouquet of roses wielded by Doris Day. Frame the encounter in a Hopper-inspired set from which all traces of menace have been expunged – no nighthawks dare lurk in bustling Adina’s Diner – and you have the perfect operatic antidote (more effective than any of Dulcamara’s potions) to the Read more ...
David Nice
You don't need to buy into the loose hell-purgatory-paradise trajectory of Puccini's one-act operas to greet the triptych as his comprehensive masterpiece, full of wry interconnections, orchestral wizardry and grateful if tough vocal writing. Fourteen years on from his gorgeous recording, Royal Opera principal conductor Antonio Pappano is still digging for treasurable detail in each opera; and that master-director of the unexpected Richard Jones was bound to find hidden links between his already classic production of towering operatic comedy Gianni Schicchi and the two thornier propositions Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
What kind of work could possibly elbow aside the time-honoured ritual of performing Beethoven's Ninth on the penultimate (ie, the last serious) night of the Proms? The kind that even Beethoven was gobsmacked by. That's the sort of reputation that stalks Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz, the prototype German Romantic opera, to whose crepuscular, horn-encrusted, tremolo-saturated, harmonic daredevilling and dramatic Gothicism the whole 19th century (and even Mahler and Strauss) paid homage. An epic reputation undermined slightly by a suspiciously thin performance history. Read more ...