Opera
stephen.walsh
Götterdämmerung is not only the grandest of Wagner’s Ring operas, it is also the most varied. Siegfried’s journey down the Rhine transports him in a short quarter-hour from the hieratic world of the Norns and the World Ash to the soap-opera of the Gibichungs and their anxieties about marriage and political standing (opinion polls?).The second act culminates in a revenge trio worthy of Meyerbeer. Siegfried’s squalid onstage murder – shades of Bizet’s exactly contemporary Carmen – is followed by a thirty-minute disquisition on the end of the world.I exaggerate, but only a little. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Sometimes a production which isn’t trying to do anything too clever can be quite refreshing. Sinéad O’Neill's revival of Annabel Arden’s 2007 Glyndebourne touring production of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore is just that.It doesn’t attempt a retelling of the story, or provide any flashy visual trickery. Instead it’s slick, stylish and straight to the point - and tremendous fun to boot. With excellent performances from all cast members, this is classic opera buffa at its best. An uncomplicated production of this opera is apt for the story too. As we know, there is no secret love potion; no Read more ...
Russell Hepplewhite
Taking a book and lifting it from the page so that it works on the stage is daunting. When the target audience happens to be children aged between about four and eight, the challenge is magnified. As I write this, a brand new company, Ignite Music, is about to embark on a nationwide tour of an opera I wrote back in 2014 that was composed specifically for this audience - the ones with the very youngest of ears. So as I attended final rehearsals very recently I was reminded of the creative journey that was taken to bring Borka: The Adventures of A Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re going to be locked in an auditorium with a crazed soldier for over 90 minutes, you need to be overwhelmed by the human frailty and baseness in Büchner’s still-shocking stage play of the late 1830s, the spiderweb beauty of Berg’s 1925 score to match it and a vision in various stage pictures. Director Deborah Warner, conductor Antonio Pappano and set designer Hyemi Shin deliver on all fronts.Though each of Shin’s stunning images is perfectly composed, and so well lit by Adam Silverman, there’s less unity in Warner’s production than there was in, for example, Richard Jones’s Welsh Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Why stage Don Giovanni in a post #MeToo world? That’s the question most frequently being asked about Mariame Clément’s new production for Glyndebourne and on its opening night she delivered a response that was as conceptually subtle as it was visually flamboyant.Together with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – conducted with flair and vigour by Evan Rogister – she teased out the contradictions and paradoxes that define not just Mozart’s flawed Bacchanalian anti-hero but those who surround him. Today we have cancel culture – back then they had hell – and it’s a tribute to Clément Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Pearl Fishers is very much a mid-19th century Romantic opera, with a plot that’s basically a love triangle set in an exotic location. Its writers, Michel Carré and Eugène Cormon, were not the greatest of plot inventors, and after hearing the opening scene alone, you might think much the same about the inspiration of the music, beautifully crafted though it is.But then there’s that astonishing tune, attached first to the duet for the two men in love with memory of the same woman, “Au fond du temple saint”. Bizet knew a good thing when he wrote one, and he keeps bringing it back again and Read more ...
David Nice
Two recent operas by women have opened in London’s two main houses within a week. Both have superbly crafted librettos dealing with gun violence without a shot being fired, giddyingly fine production values and true ensembles guided by perfect conducting. The main difference is that while Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence feels to me ice-cold musically, and not always coherent with dramatic or vocal possibilities, Jeanine Tesori’s Blue hits us in the guts when it matters most.The game-changer at the London Coliseum is that Blue (a reference to the colour of American police uniforms) features a cast Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Invasion by a colonising power has convulsed a country, dividing families – even individuals – between the rival claims of resistance and collaboration. A captured freedom-fighter from the indigenous elite faces execution; an imperial general hopes to wed his widow and bring a kind of peace to the conquered land.Meanwhile, another local leader has thrown in his lot with the invaders – to the dismay of his rebel children. You can see why the action of Arminio, which Handel saw premiered at Covent Garden in 1737, might appeal to a director with an eye on recent history – or on today’s headlines Read more ...
David Nice
To create a sensitive and original music-drama around the subject of a school killing is a colossal achievement. Director Simon Stone, set designer Chloe Lamford and novelist Sofi Oksanen’s cutting libretto make Innocence seem like a masterpiece. I wish I were less ambivalent about Kaija Saariaho’s score.More trenchant than her previous tapestries of bewitching sounds, it's both superbly conducted by Susanna Mälkki and played with absolute assurance by the Royal Opera Orchestra. From the start, bassoons define writhing ideas of the kind we haven’t often encountered in her music before, other Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4th-century Rome. It’s a red rag to directors, and there’s a relief to seeing the oratorio in the concert hall, where the composer is cut free from a lot of acrobatic conceptual wriggling. And really, when it sounds like this, you need nothing more.Back in 2018 Jonathan Cohen and his period group Arcangelo brought Theodora to the Proms. Distant and correct in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, it never quite caught fire. Five years on and Cohen and leading lady Read more ...
Robert Beale
Mansfield Park was written to be a country house opera – that kind where you have a smallish number of performers, no chorus, and the “set” is simply the rooms and furnishings of a gracious residence from an age gone by.Accompaniment was originally four hands on one piano. But the concept soon grew to be more than that: composer Jonathan Dove made a small-orchestra score of its warm and melodious music, and music training institutions realised that with seven out of the 10 roles in the story being young people, they had a gift for their public theatre shows.The Royal Northern College of Music Read more ...
David Nice
Is Korngold a second-rank composer with some first-rate ideas? Most performances of the 23-year-old Viennese prodigy's Die tote Stadt make it seem so. Nearly smothered in glitter and craft, the story can compel – an oblique, promising stance on Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte, about an obsessive widower who thinks he sees his dead wife in a vivacious dancer. Does Annilese Miskimmon, ENO's semi-visible Artistic Director, carry it off?For much of the time, yes. Her collaboration with the best of set designers Miriam Buether and lighing by James Farncombe is especially successful when Read more ...