Opera
graham.rickson
This new production of Handel’s Alcina opens well, with no preamble, the protagonists’ arrival on the island inhabited by the titular sorceress suggested by footage of rushing water projected onto the backdrop. This is billed as Opera North’s first sustainable production, the costumes, furniture and props all second-hand.Designer Hannah Clark’s “Heaven on Earth” is little more than a patch of linoleum littered with scruffy office chairs and the characters are in modern dress, their mismatched outfits seemingly sourced from a charity shop. Thankfully, video designer William Galloway’s Read more ...
David Nice
One thing’s clear from Irish National Opera’s bold championship of Vivaldi: he’s his own man when it comes to the stage, not some baroque generic, even if Bajazet is a pasticcio incorporating other composers’ music. He doesn’t characterize through arias as keenly as Handel, but his string writing is unique, and what a revelation to have Peter Whelan’s inspirational guidance from the harpsichord of 10 other players in the Irish Baroque Orchestra.Visually, there's much to admire. Molly O'Cathain's tarnished gold-and-wood set helps the singers to project - it's perfect for touring - and works Read more ...
David Nice
Some of Handel's late London oratorios, like the indestructible Semele, work well as fully staged operas. Others, usually the ones which swap mythology for the sacred, need dramatic help. Theodora is one of them, though Peter Sellars' now-legendary Glyndebourne production had a once-in-a-lifetime intensity. The singing if not the acting is more fitfully stunning here, but Katie Mitchell just about pulls off one of her most vivid and focused reimaginings.This is certainly her best Handel staging to date, even if advance puffery about its extreme nature turns out to have been exaggerated. We Read more ...
David Nice
History’s most grotesque act of cynicism has to be the model ghetto the Nazis mocked up for the cameras in Terezin/Theresienstadt in October 1944, several days before transporting all the musicians and smartly-dressed attendees present at the concert included in the film to Auschwitz.What haunted me most during the last three months of 2020, when I ran a 10-week Zoom course on Czech music, was what happened to the conductor, Karel Ančerl, and the composer of the Study for String Orchestra being so brilliantly played in the film clip by the Jewish string players, Pavel Haas (taking a bow as Read more ...
Femi Elufowoju jr
I find that my experience of living as a Black man in the UK cannot help but inform the way I approach my work and never more so than with Verdi’s Rigoletto. It was because Verdi’s and his librettist Piave’s exploration of the impact of difference resonated with me so strongly that I was encouraged to take on this directing role for Opera North. It also inspired me to make Rigoletto’s disability less about an anatomical anomaly and more about the paranoia engendered by a belief that you can never fully integrate with those around you. It is that paranoia which means Rigoletto’s brain is Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
This latest revival of the Royal Opera’s Nabucco production has suffered more than most from COVID disruptions. At the first night, on 20 December, the chorus were obliged to wear masks, news that was greeted by boos from the audience. Then the next two performances were cancelled.This one did take place, but without conductor Daniel Oren or star soprano Anna Netrebko, the latter grounded by travel restrictions. But we got a performance, no doubt a relief in some quarters, as the occasion marked the 75th anniversary of the company.The production, directed by Daniele Abbado, first appeared in Read more ...
David Nice
One of the galvanizing wonders of the operatic world happened when David McVicar’s production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro was new, back in 2006: the sight and sound of Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano in seamless dual role as conductor and recitative fortepianist.Now he’s back, and better than ever, with more than a gimmick to offer in this latest revival: there are no big names in the cast, but six out of the eight principals are Italian – this Figaro is, of course, sung to Lorenzo Da Ponte’s original, dazzling adaptation of Beaumarchais’ play – and young when the characters Read more ...
David Nice
January to mid-May 2021 were the bleakest Covid months, yielding only the occasional livestream at least half as good as being there (Barrie Kosky’s magically reinvented Strauss Der Rosenkavalier from Munich, a film of Britten's The Turn of the Screw around Wilton’s Music Hall more imaginative than the actual production). The burden then fell, in England at least, on the country opera houses. It was clear from the start that the operatic heroes of the year would be the administrations of Glyndebourne, Garsington, Grange Park Opera, The Grange Festival, Longborough, plus others we didn't Read more ...
David Nice
Two major composers took Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies as the subject for two very different operas. The 19 year old Rachmaninov in 1892 had inspiration but not much sense of dramatic continuity; Leoncavallo in 1912, 20 years on from his deserved smash hit Pagliacci, managed the flow but not the inspiration. Give me Rachmaninov’s memorability any day, but at least Leoncavallo’s hokum had the benefit of the best singers and conducting at Cadogan Hall last night.Quality was assured before the first note of the evening. Carlo Rizzi, here conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, stands Read more ...
David Nice
That the ever-decreasing circles of Richard Jones’s first Wagner Ring instalment for English National Opera ended in a no-show for the fire that should have made former Valkyrie supreme Brünnhilde proof against all but a fearless hero – Westminster City Council poured cold water on it before this first night – is in a way the least of it.An act which has begun so searingly with a first-rate septet of warrior maidens and blazing orchestra under an ever-masterly Martyn Brabbins fizzles into some very choppy singing for the father-daughter confrontation which should make for one of the most Read more ...
Richard Bratby
"Nature is healing," declared the social media meme, back in the early days of lockdown when humanity had temporarily retreated to focus on its banana bread. There were pictures to prove it, apparently. Dolphins sported in the canals of Venice; city gardens filled with newly emboldened songbirds. Didn’t a herd of goats colonise Llandudno at one point? Something like that, anyway.What’s certain is that the aftermath has seen a boom in the population of operatic foxes. Vixens were sighted this summer in Longborough and Holland Park; there’s one due at ENO in February. They’re less common in the Read more ...