Opera
igor.toronyilalic
Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is first and foremost a psychological horror. And psychological horrors are all about rocking the mental boat. Capsizing the mental boat. Sinking the mental boat. David McVicar’s production of The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera does not rock the mental boat. He doesn't rock any boat. I'm not sure McVicar is in a boat. He plays the work so supremely safe, so PG-safe, so two-condom safe, that I feel McVicar is nowhere near a boat; I imagine him on dry land, in a deck chair sipping a piña colada, flicking through his Key Stage 1 on Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At 84 years of age, Sir Charles Mackerras is one of the best-respected and best-loved operatic conductors working in the world today. He conducts Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera tonight and, despite bouts of ill health, found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s and his run-ins with Richard Jones and Christopher Alden Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Will UK Gold now be permanently available at the Royal Opera House? Or was Italian TV being beamed into the auditorium last night by mistake? The 1970s scene before us actually just meant the return of Richard Jones’s inspired sitcom treatment of Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi to Covent Garden. Even before the curtain had lifted we were raising a 1970s titter, being prepped for a return to that decade of naughty slap and tickle with an enormous front cloth image of a Viz-like pair of breasts, bursting from their polka-dotted bust darts. In L’Heure Espagnole, we Read more ...
graham.rickson
To a bewitching, shimmering prelude, a back-projected astronaut plants a Czech flag on the lunar surface. So begins one of those evenings where you skip out of the theatre grinning and promising yourself that you will buy tickets for all your opera-disdaining friends.First performed in Prague in 1920, Brouček is the Cinderella among Janáček’s mature operas. Based on stories by the popular nationalist writer Svatopluk Čech about a drunken everyman, the opera had a troubled composition history. Janáček began writing the work in 1908, eventually finishing it in 1918, collaborating with Read more ...
frank.johnson
Frank Johnson, the great parliamentary sketch-writer who died in 2006, was a passionate fan of opera and ballet. While intensely admiring certain artists, he kept eye and pen sharp for his observations of cultural matters, mocking cabals of opinion-formers in the arts as ruthlessly as he quilled politicians. These extracts from a newly published collection of his writings, edited by his widow Virginia Fraser, show both sides of him. 5 March 1989: Benjamin Britten's whimsicalities As an impressionable youth in the 1950s and early 1960s, I endured the unceasing propaganda of the Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It’s a let-down when a new production of an opera that spends two acts feeling dazzlingly invigorating and clever collapses in a careless mess in the third. My guess is that a key scene for the concept of English National Opera’s Turandot is when Ping, Pang and Pong - three very grand court officials - turn out to be Chinese cooks sneaking smokes up the fire escape at the Emperor Palace restaurant. It's a sharp idea, generating a sensationally visual production, but that fire escape's got to lead somewhere, and in the end it's nowhere.The production is a debutants’ ball, with first-time ENO Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Buoyed by winning the Classic FM Innovation award at Friday's Classic FM Gramophone Awards for its cut-price ticket offer for Sun readers, the Royal Opera House was at it again last night with the return of Francesca Zambello's production of Carmen. There was even a short speech from Deborah Bull, welcoming the Sun contingent to the house while, of course, reminding everyone to turn off their mobile phones. For anybody making a first trip to Covent Garden, this would have been a cracking choice. Not only was there Roberto Alagna making his house debut as Don Jose, but also the Read more ...
mark.pappenheim
Following last week's new music CDs round-up, The Arts Desk introduces our monthly pick of the latest classical music CDs, ranging from vocal showpieces and rare opera to viola transcriptions and string quartets.Disc of the Month
Vivaldi: Farnace, Le Concert des Nations/Jordi Savall (3 CDs; Naïve)
For anyone who still thinks of Antonio Vivaldi simply as the composer of The Four Seasons, it may come as a shock to learn not only that the manuscripts of over 450 of his other works are currently preserved in the archives of the National University Library in Turin but that since the year 2000 the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The term "Awards Ceremony" can strike terror into the stoutest of hearts, but hats off to the masterminds of the 2009 Classic FM Gramophone awards. Their shindig at the Dorchester was enjoyable, educational, and even intermittently hilarious (and for the right reasons).Mathieu Herzog, viola player with France's Quatuor Ebène who carried off the lusted-after Recording Of The Year award for their disc of Debussy, Ravel and Fauré, even ran Antoine "Eurotrash" de Caunes close as the Frenchman the Brits love to love. Having tried, and failed, to phone his French amis back home to share the moment Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There’s nothing like a bit of communal booing to sharpen your critical faculties. And Christof Loy’s new production of Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera House last night received wave after wave after wave of it. An ocean of boos almost as deep and profound as the Wagner that had just washed over us moments before. One boo surge from above, one boo surge from below, rivulets of bass-boos and piccolo-boos from the flanks, all lapping at the half-grinning, half-freaked out German production team on stage. Fence-sitting was not possible in this maelstrom. Loy’s approach, however imperfect, Read more ...
graham.rickson
Werther is based on the young Goethe’s semi-autobiographical epistolary novel which tells of a young artist’s thwarted love for a simple country girl who is already engaged. First performed in Vienna in 1892, it is audibly a product of that time. You can hear the predominant influence of Wagner in piquant unresolved dissonances, suggestive of a fleeter-footed, gallic Tristan with added harps. The sheer depth and splendour of the music is what makes a potentially risible narrative work so gloriously: it is superbly paced and always entertaining. And Opera North’s first stab at it since 1982 Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The first in a series of podcasts in which the writer, broadcaster and former presenter of BBC Radio 3's Stage and Screen Edward Seckerson interviews the leading lights of opera and classical music. Here, the team behind English National Opera's new production of Puccini's Turandot which premieres next month.Listen to this episode.
A new production of the composer’s operatic swansong directed by young theatre director Rupert Goold, with German soprano Kirsten Blanck in her UK stage debut as the man-hating ‘ice princess’; Welsh tenor Gwyn Hughes Jones as the unknown prince whose death- Read more ...