Opera
David Nice
For last year's Europe Day concert, presidency-holder Spain fielded a Paco Peña showstopper in what's for the past three years been the venue of choice, St John's, Smith Square. This 9 May, the Hungarians' six-month stint yielded not a wow-factor spectacular - for me, that would have been a knees-up with violinist Gaby Lakatos - but instead a worthy and far from dull celebration of the Liszt bicentenary with 13-year-old Ferenc/Franz's one-act opera, Don Sanche.Only sizeable chunks of it, actually, because the nature of the event is a concise, hour-long celebration. Yet if the work Read more ...
philip radcliffe
Deep in rural Cheshire farmland, music is in the air. It’s not the music of the spheres from the Jodrell Bank radio telescope nearby, nor even the sound of the birds and the bleating of the lambs nearby. It is the music of human voices at work on scales and operatic arias. The 250-acre farm is Clonter, where for years people used to come to be entertained in the barn while picnicking amid bales of straw. Now the barn’s converted into an opera theatre - "the Glyndebourne of the North".The venue wasn’t easy to find in those early days among Cheshire’s winding lanes, high hedges and farm tracks Read more ...
David Nice
Anything goes in the wacky world of Berlioz’s Faust story. It’s a heaven and hell of a lot better than Gounod’s, but it isn’t an opera, it isn’t an oratorio and it certainly isn’t the gospel according to Goethe. So Terry Gilliam, ENO’s latest wild-card debut director, was right not to play by all of the composer’s already rather warped rules. At first you sigh: not the Nazis and the Holocaust again. But only an oddball visionary like Gilliam is going to come anywhere near the often disorienting musical pictures painted by the most original of Romantics.And the Romantic movement in which Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We all knew about the throat problems and the vocal-cord-threatening surgery. But Rolando Villazón's post-operation return to the Royal Opera House last night appeared to reveal heart issues too. At least that was the only way I could explain the endless arm-swinging and chest-clutching. Twenty, perhaps 30, times he clutched and swung. Surely this wasn't Villazón's attempt to characterise Werther's heartache, was it?For the first two acts, it seemed so. It initially blew a hole in the work. Jules Massenet's Werther is an economical drama. The libretto (an adaptation of Goethe's Read more ...
graham.rickson
Janáček’s stark Prelude is a stunner: there’s no conventional beginning, no conventional thematic development; it simply starts, as if a light switch has been flicked on, and the baleful opening theme is distorted, repeated, squeezed until it leads into an extraordinary stretch of solo violin writing. Based on Dostoevsky’s novel, Janáček’s final opera isn’t a faithful adaptation – it’s a selection of loosely linked scenes spread over three concise acts.A new inmate, Goryanchikov, arrives and is flogged as a political prisoner. In the closing minutes he’s pardoned and released, while the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
"Ne me touchez pas! Ne me touchez pas!" Mélisande's jittery first words could be the motto for the whole of Pelléas et Mélisande. How to touch, what to touch, when to and when not to touch, more specifically, how to mark without bruising, are the subjects and challenges thrown up by Debussy's delicate piece of operatic symbolism. Ones that all the artists in last night's concert performance at the Barbican Hall tackled with incredible levels of musicality.There wasn't just an extraordinary sensitivity to the delicacies of this miraculous score. There was an honouring of the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
When OperaUpClose's bar-side production of La bohème beat the ENO and Royal Opera House to the Olivier Awards' Best New Production gong earlier this year, it was hard - even in these award-sceptical parts - not to delight in the David versus Goliath-like nature of the victory. State funds and high-profile support has since beefed up this fragile dinghy of a venture. One new fan, Mark Ravenhill, was invited to direct Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea. Another, Michael Nyman, was asked to write an intervention aria. Could these artistic stars halt a recent spate of post-bohème Read more ...
David Nice
Long before the curtain rose on this soapy operatic tale of power and poison, one big question loomed: could director Paul Curran, could anyone, bring Rimsky-Korsakov's sweet, doomed and very Russian bride to convincing life? The music's mostly strong, and unusually singer-friendly for this composer; the historically dodgy plot's patchy, but not inimical to resetting in the queasy milieu of the new Russian rich. Given the bloodstained start in a swish Moscow restaurant, I thought Curran could be on to something, but by the end of the evening it was just a tawdry old melodrama dressed up in Read more ...
graham.rickson
Unpleasant feelings of confinement and claustrophobia hit you when the curtain rises after Beethoven’s disconcertingly jolly overture; one small room is visible on stage, framed by black curtains. The sun shines oppressively through the barred windows, and the characters look constrained, physically awkward. After the occasionally over-the-top visuals of several recent Opera North productions it’s good to watch something so clean and uncluttered. The beauty of Tim Albery’s production, originally staged by Scottish Opera in 1994, is its unfussiness and clarity – nothing happens on stage that Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Royal Opera House's 2011-12 season takes place under the shadow of a 15 per cent cut in public funding and the looming London Olympics. There are 12 ballet bills and 18 opera nights, including one new opera and two new short ballets.Tony Hall, ROH chief executive, said there would be no open session for the attendees to ask questions. He said, “Much of our conversation has been about the Arts Council and cuts, and of course we’ve taken our fair share of the pain.” He said the frontloading of the cuts would reduce the next season but the main effect would be delayed until after the Read more ...
David Nice
Last night the programme for the Royal Opera's current production of Fidelio included a special tribute to that most characterful of tenors, Robert Tear, who died this week at the age of 72. Only once did I have the immense pleasure of spending time in the company of this warm and witty man in a Radio 3 book-review programme, which was funny and easy thanks to his interesting, and interested, conversation. He was, though, a constant presence in my life through his wonderfully interactive response to the performance around him when sitting on a concert platform and the number of precisely Read more ...
David Nice
What's this? Goosebumps? Tears? Surely not in the usually brittle world of the Savoy operas. Yet handle Sullivan's pathos with tenderness, make everyone believe in a recognition scene between a sinning fairy and her preening peer of a husband, and the spectators will be putty in your hands. It helps that they've already been softened by top-notch baritones, tenors and falsettists, tickled by dance routines and amazed by the freshness of Gilbert's lyrics - all suffused by the glow of Wilton's Music Hall, which can incline us to take even a spoof fairyland a little seriously. Lloyd Webber, eat Read more ...