Opera
Christopher Lambton
The last-minute indisposition of your leading lady is enough to give festival directors palpitations, let alone their audiences, now forewarned by the dreaded email thudding into inboxes. And so it was that Andrew Moore, Head of Music at the Edinburgh International Festival, had to poke his nose through the stage curtain and announce that Natalya Romaniw was unable to sing the title role of Rusalka, which would instead be sung by fellow Welsh soprano Elin Pritchard.Yet any fears that this would in any way be an inferior substitution were unfounded – Pritchard has covered the role at Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
It is mid-way through the new Ring cycle, and we are taking lunch outside the old town hall on the high street in Bayreuth. Discussion at neighbouring tables is intense: “The Ring is a child!”, “Why does Wotan have no spear?”, “The pyramid in the box – what is that all about?”The new production, by Austrian director Valentin Schwarz, is streamlined and modern. It clears away much of Wagner’s symbolism and reassigns the narrative to new and disparate ideas. The reception has been decidedly mixed, but many of the new concepts deserve careful consideration.The production, and the entire Bayreuth Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Joseph Heller grew tired of being told that he’d never written anything as good as Catch 22. ‘Who has?’, he'd retort. In the same spirit, it’s futile to compare Gilbert and Sullivan’s late flop Utopia, Limited to The Mikado, The Gondoliers, Iolanthe or The Pirates of Penzance.So it’s not as good. Well, what is? True, you’ll meet occasional Savoyards who claim it’s their personal favourite, just as there are Mozartians (seriously, they walk among us) who maintain that La Clemenza di Tito is their personal number one. Sure, you mutter as you edge slowly away, trying to avoid eye contact. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Diversity is a great idea, but it can sometimes contain the seeds of its own downfall. Positive discrimination is an obvious, frequent example. But there are two different cases in Longborough’s double bill of Freya Waley-Cohen’s Spell Book and Francesca Caccini’s La liberazione di Ruggiero dall’isola di Alcina, the one case to do with the character of the work itself, the other to do mainly with the philosophy behind its performance here. Francesca Caccini was the daughter of Giulio Caccini, a composer and singer in Florence around 1600, well-known to music students, at least by name, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Uncut, lovingly restored, and with two intervals in the antique manner, Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers invites its audience to embark on an epic voyage as well as a momentous one. This summer’s Glyndebourne Festival visit to the Proms brought us the rediscovered opera about a pious, paranoid community of Cornish ship-scavengers that the trail-blazing Smyth – who judged it her signature work – laboured over for several years before its premiere in Leipzig in 1906.Glyndebourne gave us the original French-language version with a somewhat florid libretto by Smyth’s collaborator (and sometime lover) Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Take an opera newbie along to Opera Holland Park’s double bill of rarities and they may have both their worst fears and their highest hopes confirmed. Outlandish plotting, overwrought melodrama and preposterous, supernatural stage business abounds. At the same time, some gorgeous music, memorable singing and dramatic coups make the whole fanciful spectacle soar and glow. Ecstasy and absurdity join clammy hands. Served together in this way, Delius’s Margot La Rouge and Puccini’s Le Villi offer a kind of small-plate tasting menu from the late 19th-century lyric stage (although the Delius dates Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How do you celebrate one of epic poetry’s richest female characters, a queen renowned across the Middle East and North Africa for being as politically powerful as she was magnetic? For Nahum Tate, the librettist for Dido and Aeneas, the curious answer is to push aside Dido’s achievements as a ruler and city builder and replace Virgil’s stirring metaphor for her plight with something, well, a little tamer.It’s no small part of the great achievement of Purcell’s score that it takes Tate’s frankly mediocre poetry and through harmonic and rhythmic innovation transforms the base metal of his words Read more ...
Robert Beale
Buxton International Festival’s opera scene is clearly back on track for 2022, and its most substantial production a taut and tension-filled presentation of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago.Jacopo Spirei’s production, with design by Madeleine Boyd, has just one basic set: it changes from Act One to Act Two by removing two evocative visual elements (a hearth and a panel of generally rustic appearance) and replacing them with geometrical and electrically dazzling shapes, and it has a binary contrast of costumes – ragged rebel Highlanders and sophisticated, techno-style royal loyalists.So, from the Read more ...
David Nice
After the long interval, as darkness falls, the screw turns in this Garsington revival more woundingly than any I can remember for Britten's most concentrated masterpiece. Evil chords, trills, cadenzas and silences from the 13 superb Philharmonia players conducted by Mark Wigglesworth duly terrorise; Verity Wingate as the Governess to two orphaned children in a house which seems haunted by their former elders really does seem possessed.If everyone has to work harder in the first act, audience included, that's the nature of the beautiful Garsington beast. True, ghosts can appear in broad Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reviewing the Grange Festival production of Tamerlano the other day, I noted the difficulty Handel poses the modern director with his byzantine plots and often ludicrous love tangles, expressed through music of surpassing brilliance but mostly stereotyped forms. But at least Tamerlano is a comprehensible story with its feet planted firmly in a sort of reality. In Alcina earthbound reality is hardly anywhere to be seen. We are on a magic island ruled by the enchantress of the title, who disposes of her many lovers by turning them into wild beasts or rocks, trees or rivers. Bradamante Read more ...
David Nice
Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, a stunning Elsa in this Royal Opera season's revival of Wagner’s Lohengrin, was the lure to sit through Jan Philipp Gloger's Mozart Così again (the title, by the way – "All Women Do It" – belies the complexity applied to a schematic plot). As it turned out, the mixed-up couples were all love’s young dream, which made it all the more of a shame that this production remains determined to squash their hopes and even their new matches.Gloger has shown us that Mozart's Dorabella, the flightier of two sisters under siege, doesn't take too long to see through barely Read more ...
David Nice
Could this be the summer Bayreuth finally sees a new Ring production that comes anywhere near its last great epic success, Harry Kupfer’s, which ran from 1988-92? If so, it’s been pipped to the post by a rather more comfortable and bijou opera house on the other side of the lake to the refuges where Wagner worked on more masterpieces – beautiful sites both, even if the “asyl” next to the Villa Wesendonck is no more..Zurich Opera’s Intendant Andreas Homoki, following a mixed record to date as director and designer, has taken the plunge with Music Director Gianandrea Noseda to dazzle with the Read more ...