Opera
David Nice
I'll admit that many of us were spoiled by the last revival of Boccanegra at Covent Garden - also of Verdi's most often heard and masterly revision, like the current staging, but using Ian Judge's production of the original version - boasting a near-perfect quartet of principals who all meshed with each other. The only survivor from that team to be seen in the latest showing is Ferrucio Furlanetto (pictured with Domingo above), whose Prologue aria as the vengeful father of Boccanegra's ill-fated love was cheered to the rafters then but barely made an impact this time, oddly over-acted and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The story starts promisingly with a love story between a prisoner Gomatz and Zaide, the favourite concubine of the tyrant Soliman. The two lovers escape with the help of Allazim. They are re-captured. Then Mozart gave up. His sources for the story, by Sebastiani and Voltaire’s Zaïre, ended it by the dubious plot twist that Zaide and Gomatz are actually brother and sister and that Allazim saved Soliman’s life some years earlier and he lets them all free. The strongest bits of the unfinished opera are a few arias, notably “Ruhe sanft” – which has become a concert staple. Perhaps Mozart Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Watching and hearing this revival of WNO’s now eight-year-old production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, it’s hard to remember he composed it only a year or two before La Traviata, that most psychologically believable of all his operas. In Rigoletto nothing makes sense: the hunchback’s pretty daughter, her apparently willing incarceration, Rigoletto’s hoodwinking (literally) into helping her abduction, her final self-sacrifice – all palpable nonsense. Yet the piece never seriously fails. In a sense it’s music drama at its purest: the plot is an appendage to the music, what Wagner later called “deeds of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You'd be forgiven for thinking that an opera that - in all seriousness - climaxes to the words, "Farewell, little table. You seemed so large," might need a small, but firm, slap in the face. But you'd be quite wrong. Manon is really quite froth-free. Its operatic brothers-in-arms are Lulu and The Rake's Progress, charting as they all do the rise and tumbling fall of an innocent at the hands of a corrupting city; its allusive musical ways reach out to Debussy and Puccini. The point is, it's a modern work. Add director Laurent Pelly (of La Fille du régiment fame), Anna Netrebko and young Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The beautiful gardens of Garsington Manor might seem an ideal setting for Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its ilex groves, its miniature forests of pyramid yew, and its paths overhung (o’er-canopied?) with climbing roses. So it’s a mild shock to confront on the actual stage what looks like a huge attic store-room littered with beds, chucked in at all angles, a few lamps, various items of bric-à-brac, and, upstage centre, a large C. S. Lewis-style wardrobe through which, in due course, characters enter and exit.Bed admittedly is iconic in the Dream, a work in which half the Read more ...
David Nice
Only those who think the burnt-out question of Wagner and the Nazis can still be brought to bear on his operas could be disappointed by Richard Jones's life-enhancing new production. Not a swastika in sight, not a hint of anti-semitic caricature for the fallguy who was never intended for it in the first place, only affirmation of the opera's central message that great art can bring order and understanding to society.It launches with a masterstroke: a dropcloth collage portraying German-speaking genius from Bach and Mozart to Pina Bausch and Michael Haneke, embracing all creeds and persuasions Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Edward Gardner is no longer English National Opera's best kept secret. The former choral scholar and repetiteur goes from strength to strength helming ENO through productive and interesting times. The world's stages are now beckoning. During a break in final rehearsals for Mozart's great opera seria Idomeneo in a new production from multi-media queen Katie Mitchell he talks informally about what being music director of a company like this entails.The long conversations with directors (what kind of things is Terry Gilliam asking him ahead of his operatic debut next season?), the relationship Read more ...
rebecca.ritzel
To get a feel for whether an arts festival has truly penetrated a city’s psyche, it helps to strike up a conversation with local Starbucks baristas. That’s why I was grateful to be asked one recent evening in Toronto, “So what exactly is Luminato?”As the green-aproned server handed me a post-show cup of tea, I thought, good question: what is Luminato? Four years after the festival’s founding, it seems many Toronto residents remain unsure. I explained that it’s an arts festival with many different events, including performances at nearby theatres. As it happens, I had just come from a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Anyone hoping to take refuge from last night’s football fever in the solemn halls of the Royal Opera House would have scored something of an own goal. Heading the bill for OperaShots – a trio of new operas staged in the intimate Linbury Theatre – was Jocelyn Pook’s Ingerland, an operatic meditation on the beautiful game. Framed by shorter works from Orlando Gough and Nitin Sawhney, the evening was a chance for three established composers to have a “shot” at opera for the first time. With Gough promising not so much an attempt as a “shot across the bow of opera”, we prepared ourselves for Read more ...
David Nice
It's official, like it or not: director Katie Mitchell is the high priestess appointed to make plain the ways of ancient family sacrifice to modern man. She had the high ground of collaborating with composer James MacMillan on his stunning new opera The Sacrifice, based on a Mabinogion revenge saga; but the jury's still out over whether her National Theatre retelling of ancient Greek bloodgrudge wasn't rather too doggedly echoed in her production of Handel's Jephtha. Besides, when that came to ENO, there were basic problems of blocking and operatic stagecraft. They loomed large again in this Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of fleetingly funny moments. Halfway through the regicidal Second Act, we stumble upon a castle porter gibbering on about the bodily consequences of drink - "nose-painting, sleep and urine". Verdi's opera mostly shuns these vignettes for the bigger, more concentratedly darker picture. The music works itself up into an ornamented mania and for the most part broods on low orchestral colourings. There is nothing funny about a single second of it. Why Richard Jones has therefore decided to send the whole thing up for Glyndebourne in a series of dumb gags is Read more ...
Jasper Rees
We love Gareth Malone, don’t we? We are big fans of the Pied Piper of primetime. And so we should be. The youth of today seem impressively eager to down tools, put away childish things like knives and drugs and safe-cracking equipment, and follow this slightly weedy and totally uncool choirmaster out onto the concert platform. Our glorious new coalition should be using him to tackle crime. No sooner does he move into a tough working-class ‘hood wielding nothing more than a Michael Jackson songbook than the figures for shootings, muggings and moochings about on street corners drop through the Read more ...