Opera
David Nice
What kind of Aida would you prefer: one in which singing actors stretched to the limits find Verdi's human volcano of emotions beneath the cod-Egyptian rubble, or a stand-and-deliver production with a stalwart cast of beaten-bronze voices? Having had a taste at least of the former once in my life, I wasn't very happy to succumb to the latter in this Covent Garden revival. It was the wall of sound in the big Act II ensemble which made me at least willing to be convinced.And then I wasn't. And then I was again. It's that kind of a show, a reminder of the bad old repertoire days at the Royal Read more ...
David Nice
Let's begin at the end. Isn't the nuns-to-the-scaffold scene which concludes Poulenc's ultimate testament of doubt and faith the deepest, most heart-wrenching finale in all opera? It even has the edge over Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier trio and duet, in that the singers often end up in tears as well as the audience. If my eyes were dry at the end of the Guildhall School's valiant staging, that's not because the production lacked the necessary clarity, imagination and motion, nor was it due to any dearth of good voices. But clearly something wasn't quite right.Perhaps it was a question of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
At 25 years old, Jonathan Miller’s Mikado may be more Grande Dame than ingénue, but it still has a Charleston kick in its step and a shimmy in its pearls. Styled and stylised, chic and slick, it's as far from the operetta’s ubiquitous am-dram incarnations as from the Japan of the original. Yet just as the Minimalist decor and monochrome palette of an Art Deco interior prove unforgiving to the smallest hint of dust or casual clutter, so the sharp lines of this production provide little cover for the relaxed paunch or middle-aged spreadings of a revival.Bathed in a lava flow of white Read more ...
David Nice
Hot on the heels of our feature celebrating 25 years of Jonathan Miller's Mikado at English National Opera, the latest revival of which opens tonight, veteran Savoyard Richard Suart sent through the most recent candidates for the Lord High Executioner's chop as he will be delivering them onstage (with no doubt a twist or two as the run proceeds).Understandably he didn't want me to spill all the beans, but gave his gracious consent to the preview of a few victims in the latest of his now celebrated spins on Gilbert's lyrics. They include - no prizes for having guessed this one -
The Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the WNO season brochure assures us, “is Italian opera at its most passionate and full-blooded”. But you could sit through this revival of Peter Watson’s seven-year-old production and overlook the fact. Always understated (to put it kindly), with age it has retreated further into its shell. The singers face front and largely ignore one another; the soldiers seem to have taken orders from the latest tottering Middle Eastern tyrant not to fire on their own people. There are no flames to trouble Azucena’s conscience; no blood, not much passion. It’s a very small volcano in a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Look past the cum buckets, the trucker pussy, the fuck you-ing and cunt-hungry beasting (librettist Richard Thomas's words, not mine), the mountainous titties and cheap promotional candy that had been confected for the legions of rubbishy celebrity opera virgins scattered in the Royal Opera House audience at last night's world premiere and you will find a profoundly conservative, and mostly not unattractive, new opera in Anna Nicole.Most conservative was the story. Put-upon female has life destroyed for evening's entertainment - ie, classic operatic fallen-woman porn. Ask Violetta, Lulu Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Some of you will know that Wagner and I haven't been seeing eye to eye of late. Last year's Tannhäuser I believed was the end of the road for the two of us. Not quite. With one of the most celebrated Wagner productions of the past two decades returning to the English National Opera last night - Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Parsifal - I decided to give him a final chance. My whole mind, body and soul was primed to repel it, yet I came out almost blubbing.The revelation didn't come immediately - nothing in Wagner comes immediately - though it didn't take long for the music to start having its Read more ...
David Nice
Rumour has it that Snoop Dogg may be serenading the royals there in a couple of months' time, but this afternoon it was the most agile, even and full soprano voice of all which rang from the vaulting of Westminster Abbey. Thanks to the noble co-operation of the Royal Opera House - serving up its orchestra and music director, Antonio Pappano - the Australian High Commission and the Australian Music Foundation, we celebrated the life and works of Dame Joan Sutherland in the high, orchestrated style which only this kind of event could have done full justice.She WAS the Bright Seraphim of Handel' Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Those WNO regulars who remember the company’s last Fledermaus (directed nine years ago by Calixto Bieito) with a shiver of horror can rest assured that its replacement contradicts it at almost every point. John Copley, past-master of Texttreue (truth to the text, or at least its spirit), does not rummage around in Strauss’s frothy masterpiece for a critique of modern man, does not transplant it to Merthyr Tydfil or turn it into a rugger-club knees-up, does not coarsen the text or doublecross the music.Instead, he accepts it as it is: a middle-class fantasy of the high life with Vienna as its Read more ...
David Nice
Metcentric New Yorkers tend to think an opera hasn’t achieved classic status until it arrives at their vast inner sanctum. Whereas other cities worldwide know that the inimitable Peter Sellars production of grand opera’s last masterpiece (to date) has become a virtual brand since its 1987 Houston premiere. John Adams's first, and biggest, opera was an obvious here-to-stay triumph at the Edinburgh Festival the following year, and its strengths become more apparent with the passing of time. What we celebrated last night was the way this hallucinatory musical meditation around 1972's East-meets- Read more ...
graham.rickson
Based on a short story by Gogol, Alexander Medvedev’s libretto for Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Portrait was originally conceived for Shostakovich. It was subsequently passed to Weinberg, who finished his opera in 1980. It’s a bleak, Faustian tale of a struggling artist who buys the eponymous painting, after which material success is mirrored by moral collapse.You can’t help making comparisons between Weinberg’s musical style and that of his mentor. It’s audible in the staccato wind writing and angular string lines in the first act. Weinberg’s gift is for suggesting character with the most Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Dragon Opera (or Opera’r Ddraig, if you insist: they don’t) is in every sense a young company, founded a mere two years ago, and based at Cardiff’s Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Its singers, directors and orchestral players are nearly all recent or current students at the college, the company is run by recent graduates, and its funding is set up by a student collective called RepCo, run from the RWCMD, and parent also to a couple of student orchestras and a community choir. Even the audience is, for once, not the usual gathering of senior citizens. In terms of arts enterprise, this Read more ...