Door-sized detachable nipples, an angel of death with a dick to die for (literally), a cave of an arse housing a disco-dancing unit of storm troopers and an all-singing all-dancing couple of randy cadavers. Ever wondered what the Europeans might have done if they’d ever got hold of the Carry On brand? The ENO’s new production of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre offers up one possibility. Few new productions have been so keenly anticipated as this one from Catalan theatre company La Fura dels Baus that opened the ENO’s new season last night.And it was hard not to be impressed by the scale of their Read more ...

It finally came just over three hours in. Ferruccio Furlanetto’s gouty Philip II leans his elbow on his chair and begins to grind his head into his right-hand like he's a human pestle and mortar. He first castigates himself for ever having thought that his wife, Elizabeth of Valois - who he suspects of sleeping with his son, Don Carlos - might have fancied his unyielding, aged presence, and then tries to sing his way out of his tortured predicament. With this searchingly eloquent confessional - Furlanetto's rich bass voice resounding like an open fire - came the first - and pretty much the Read more ...

The hills are alive with the sound of... well, Donizetti, actually. His mature "Melodramma Semiserio" Linda di Chamounix arrived towards the climax of a prolific career in opera and was clearly a late attempt to capitalise on his successes and give his adoring audiences a little of everything and at great length. This season-opener concert performance at the Royal Opera (recorded, incidentally, by Opera Rara) was not far short in duration of Verdi’s epic Don Carlo, a starry revival of which occupies this very stage imminently.As the subtitle implies, the really startling thing about  Read more ...

The film critic Mark Kermode maintains that if a film is advertised on the side of a bus, it will inevitably be rubbish. Opera North are advertising this revival of Tim Albery’s 2004 Così fan tutte extensively on the sides of buses here in Leeds. Kermode’s theorem evidently doesn’t hold for opera.This production is an invigorating, life-enhancing evening which showcases all that Opera North excel at: it is visually imaginative, crisply sung and underpinned by marvellous orchestral playing. The witty English-language version (in an uncredited translation) is always audible. Conducting is by Read more ...

Among the most astonishing moments in John Adams's new opera Doctor Atomic (currently running at the English National Opera) is an aria at the end of the first act. The eponymous brains behind the Manhattan Project, Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, stands alone on stage with his new creation, a spherical A-bomb coated in wires and tubes like a patient in intensive care, and sings John Donne's holy sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person'd God".I say sings. It's really more of an explosion of anguish, rage and self-loathing, spat out with desperation, Gerald Finley superbly transforming this self- Read more ...