Opera
edward.seckerson
In the 1960s Des McAnuff played guitar and wrote songs to meet girls. Subsequently life became a little more complicated for the multi-talented writer/ director. His long-standing commitment to the Shakespeare Festival Theatre at the other Stratford - in Ontario, Canada - has won him many plaudits and he is now director emeritus of the La Jolla Playhouse in California where so many important projects have germinated, including his Tony Award-winning production of The Who's Tommy and the forthcoming musical adaptation of Doctor Zhivago with a score by Lucy Simon.
Zhivago opens in Sydney, Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Melody Moore is well named. Her parents must have had a sixth sense that she would be "melodious". This exciting young American soprano has been making waves on both sides of the Atlantic. She has established footholds at both San Francisco and Los Angeles Opera and in the 2008/9 season made her English National Opera debut in Jonathan Miller's new production of La bohème. She returns to the ENO this season as Marguerite in Des McAnuff's new staging of Gounod's Faust, a role which seems to define the direction in which her voice and career are taking her.
Hers is a lyric voice with Read more ...
David Nice
Anticipating revivals of productions that were hardly vivacious in the first place, you can always find reasons to hope. Perhaps there'll be a dazzling house debut. Maybe someone, preferably the revival director, will bring a more focused individual zest to the kind of rough character sketches Jonathan Miller leaves flailing around his beautifully conceived historic locales. Not on this occasion. Singing and conducting were never less than accomplished, but only half-hearted titters from a sparse audience greeted the inhabitants of Miller's opera buffa toytown - more dullsville than doll's Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Here we go again. Art takes on capitalism, round 4,598,756. The blissful life of Harry Joy, ad exec extraordinaire, beloved father of two, is (surprise, surprise) not quite what it seems. His wife is having an affair, his daughter is fellating his son for drugs and his business clients are spreading cancer. He thinks he's in hell. But this ain't hell; it's the greedy, bourgeois reality of a capitalist West. Stalin would have been mighty proud of Australian Brett Dean's new opera, Bliss, which was receiving its European premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival. Having said that, Read more ...
hilary.whitney
For the past five years British stage designer Es Devlin has been creating extraordinarily ambitious and imaginative sets for some of the biggest crowd-pullers in the music industry, from Take That to Lady Gaga. But this week she returns to her theatrical roots with a new play, Pieces of Vincent, by David Watson at the small but prestigious Arcola Theatre in London.Devlin, who is 38, was brought up in Kent and is the second of four children. Her first professional job, on the strength of winning the Linbury Prize for Stage Design, was Edward II at the Bolton Octagon after which her career Read more ...
David Nice
Everyone concerned has, of course, total confidence and bags of experience at the end of a riotous run, warmly applauded by Edward Seckerson at Glyndebourne. Yet there were dangers to be negotiated. Only Irmgard Vilsmaier's Sieglinde-cum-Fricka of a mother and the ringing top of Alice Coote's Hansel as tough boy incarnate were really made to fill the crazy South Ken colosseum. The secret for the rest, and I'm sure Ticciati in his Proms debut must have worked on this, was not to force but rather to draw and coax us into Humperdinck's often startling late-Romantic clash of innocence, experience Read more ...
kate.connolly
It is tempting to playfully twist the German language a little to come up with a word that best describes the avant garde German theatre and film director Christoph Schlingensief. A “Wachrüttler”, literally a shaker-upper or rouser, is probably the best title to describe a man who seemed to put every vein and sinew of his body into shaking German society awake. The loss of Schlingensief, who died of lung cancer last Saturday aged 49, has left a gaping hole in the German arts world. One of the most controversial characters of cultural life here, Schlingensief made an enduring Read more ...
theartsdesk
Third in our summer book extracts series is the theatre designer Tobias Hoheisel, whose designs for Glyndebourne Opera's Janáček productions remain iconic, and more recently designed English National Opera's Boris Godunov.Born in Frankfurt, Hoheisel trained in design in Berlin and was strongly influenced by the theatre of Peter Stein/Karl-Ernst Herrmann, Luc Bondy, Robert Wilson and Ariane Mnouchkine. Patrice Chereau’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth and the world-class Berlin orchestras inculcated in him a love of opera and music.Hoheisel produced landmark Janáček stagings for Glyndebourne in Katya Read more ...
David Nice
Forget Dan Brown’s phony grail trail which has led so many paying pilgrims to Rosslyn outside Edinburgh. For the last week of the Festival Fringe the Chapel, most intricate and mysterious of 15th-century sanctuaries, has become a temple of high art dedicated to Mozart, Shakespeare and Britten. Ambitious indeed of a bunch of Cambridge undergrads and alumni to mount The Magic Flute and the operatic Midsummer Night’s Dream side by side. Did they pull it off? Just, in the case of the Britten, which is saying something given a score which is... well, again, intricate and mysterious are the Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
It's come to light that the star tenor Rolando Villazón did the decent thing and refunded his fee after singing for only seven minutes at a concert in the Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen 10 days ago.Norman Lebrecht reports that the management say that two days after the concert - which caused a furore of protest - the Mexican tenor returned his fee, which enabled them to refund fans between 500 and 1,250 kroner per ticket (that's £138 for the top price).
Villazón, who has had serious throat problems over the past two years, sang three short songs before pulling out of the two-hour concert, leaving Read more ...
David Nice
The anything-goes context of Tête à Tête's enterprising opera festival at the Riverside Studios, now in its fourth year, seemed like a good place to try it out before a packed and intrigued audience (a full production is on the way, and will feature the film sequences that constitute such a novel and integral part of the experiment). Some of us needed little persuading that Martinů was always a true original in everything he touched, even if the masterpieces were yet to come in the next few decades of exile and homesickness for his native Moravia. UK audiences have already had a chance to Read more ...
David Nice
Nobody knows any real happiness, and human kindness is rarely to be found, in Dmitri Tcherniakov's Bolshoi production of Tchaikovsky's "lyric scenes" - the most disciplined and real piece of operatic teamwork I've seen ever to come from the Russian establishment. Hollow laughter and senseless mirth envelop the traumatised, semi-autistic Tatyana of Ekaterina Shcherbachenko, one of two perfect heroines in this double-cast run and worthy of the fuss that surrounded her dewy triumph as 2009 Cardiff Singer of the World. Yet here you think not, what a marvellous singer - which she is - but instead Read more ...