Opera
alexandra.coghlan
“Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light – were all like workings of one mind.” Writing almost a century after Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Wordsworth was still contemplating the essential duality of the sublime – that greatest of Enlightenment legacies. Rationalism, order and science, we are reminded, are only the admissible part of an age that would also beget the sinister fantasies of Romanticism and the Gothic – those most pernicious of bastard offspring. It is in exposing this messily contingent relationship between the light of truth and the shadows of superstitious doubt that David Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
When future historians write the story of 21st-century film, Mike Figgis will play a founding father-like role. Figgis's Timecode (2000) was one of the world's first and most ambitious digital films. I still remember the excitement the day I saw it, the unified screen before me shattering into shards of narrative. This was the first film to sing in four simultaneously cast parts in the manner of a Bach fugue. Notwithstanding its many faults, it felt like the silver screen's Ring cycle. Last night saw Figgis try his hand at a real Gesamtkunstwerk, Donizetti's rarely heard Lucrezia Borgia Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Opera outside London flourishes in the hands of Opera North, Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera. In 2011 the popular hits such as Carmen, The Merry Widow and La Traviata intermingle with rarer landmarks such as From the House of the Dead, Orlando and Intermezzo. Wagner has a fine showing in the North and West from Opera North and Welsh National Opera. A true rarity is Opera North's British premiere of a Polish opera on a Gogol story, The Portrait, directed by the great David Pountney, whose wonderful Cunning Little Vixen production with the late Maria Bjørnson is revived at Scottish Read more ...
Ismene Brown
2011 at Covent Garden launches with two much-anticipated world premieres in February: Christopher Wheeldon's first full-length storyballet, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Mark-Anthony Turnage's Anna Nicole, written by Richard Thomas (of Jerry Springer, the Opera), and dealing with the tragic modern life of a Playboy model. The Turnage is one of eight world premieres at the Royal Opera during 2010-11, which also fields two UK premieres, five new productions and 14 revivals. The Royal Ballet listings offer eight full-length ballets and five mixed programmes. Details of all events below. Read more ...
David Nice
Perhaps her greatest achievement on disc is a role she would never have attempted in the theatre, Wagner's Isolde. Supported by the great Carlos Kleiber, the sheer meaning and luminous tone colours Price brings to every line make this one of the glories of recorded history.Below, Margaret Price sings Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und IsoldeAt the other end of the repertoire, Price excelled in Mozart. A distinguished voice coach I know singles out a radio broadcast of a Mozart mass as the most perfect piece of singing he's ever heard. The lyric quality could stretch from Susanna - on disc, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
For us Ramistes the brilliance came as no surprise. But did the genius come across to the uninitiated? This new production of Castor et Pollux, one of Rameau's finest tragédie en musique, was the Baroque composer's Austrian stage premiere. Would the Theater an der Wien's audience look past the oddities and archaisms and unfamiliarities of Rameau's 300-year-old musical and dramatic language and embrace the radical nature of his leggy recitatives and proto-Romantic ebb and flow? No question. This was the theatre that embraced the premieres of Beethoven's Third and Fifth Read more ...
David Nice
No one's saying that the mezzo of the moment, glamorous Latvian Elina Garanca, isn't a very class act indeed when it comes to high-quality opera, song and even zarzuela. But she didn't revert to the Age of Aquarius too successfully in this ill-advised TV show appearance, clearly not having visited Hair when it was on in London. The only protest here might have been from the hapless spectators. And the look makes Kiri as Michael Jackson on her Blue Skies album cover seem dignified.
Below, Elina Garanca sings "Aquarius" from Hair
{youtube}MMMe9gp1b4o {/youtube}
So let's be fair, and see Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia comes gift-wrapped in its own candy-striped box – packaging that sets the tone for the brittle, sugary entertainment within. Trading satire for slapstick, politics for aesthetics, and subversion for celebration, the production is generous in laughs but lingers scarcely longer in the mind than on the lips. With previous alumni including Mark Elder, Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez, there are some long shadows looming over the show’s hot-pink horizon, adding a not unwelcome sense of edginess to this latest Read more ...
graham.rickson
“If you’re not careful, the opening act could become a costume parade: there are the townspeople, the children, the guards, the factory women – up to 350 people on stage in 20 minutes, before Carmen even enters, singing a catchy jingle from a recent TV advert.” So wrote director Daniel Kramer in last week’s Guardian. This may fill Carmen fans with nervous apprehension, but none should be felt, as this production is one of the most visually spectacular and exciting things I’ve seen.Not all the directorial decisions work equally well, but we’ll get to one of those later Read more ...
theartsdesk
Earlier this month, George Osborne, Vince Cable and Jeremy Hunt were spotted in a Royal Opera House box surveying the country's most expensive artistic patrimony. What they thought - and how they and the Arts Council might wield their axe - will change the musical landscape of Britain forever. So here to point them in the right direction, theartsdesk's merry band of regulars - Edward Seckerson, David Nice, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Alexandra Coghlan, Graham Rickson, Stephen Walsh and Ismene Brown - separate the wheat from the chaff in this round-up of the best and worst concerts, opera, musical Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Fairy tales are fear tales really, the sweetening (and sharpening) of every child’s worst nightmares, emotions long buried in adulthood but very easily tapped back into with good theatre productions. The Witch in Hansel and Gretel should be the queen of the team of the ogres who lurk in forests or homes waiting to kill children, along with lieutenants the Wolf in Red Riding Hood, Snow White’s wicked stepmother and Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty. Last night’s opening of the Royal Opera’s revival of its jaunty 2008 production fielded in a splendid cast a tremendous Witch, Jane Henschel, the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Now that The X Factor's finally over, can we please get back to heaping opprobrium on the only Wagner that really deserves it? In the coming year opera houses around the world will be deciding whether to temporarily bankrupt themselves in 2013 to celebrate the composer's centenary. Opera Australia have announced a £10 million Ring Cycle. LA Opera and the Met are in the middle of new bank-busting cycles (£20 million and £15 million respectively). No doubt ours will want in some way to follow suit. Yet they would do well to steer clear. We cannot afford it. And we should not be encouraging this Read more ...