Opera
David Nice
Feet firmly planted on fertile native soil, but always open to the world, lyric-dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson soared into realms no-one from the rolling hills and coastline of Sweden’s Bjäre peninsula, where she grew up, could possibly have imagined. The Met, Bayreuth, and all the other great opera houses of the world fell over themselves to acquire stakes in her special incandescence, but she always returned to her home region.Her parents’ farmhouse became a summer home, and their only child laid flowers on their grave when she gave recitals in the church at Västra Karups where she’d sung Read more ...
theartsdesk
Five weeks have passed since the death of opera director Graham Vick from complications due to Covid-19, shocking even to those of us (un)prepared for the worst, and yet so many of us think about him every day. For the musicians, actors, dancers and stage crew he worked with, he's still among us, and he lives on in the hearts and minds of the ensemble he forged over years of developing his Birmingham Opera Company.A personal note on why I'm so stricken before I hand over to those who had far more creative experience of his vision. I first saw his productions when I was a student at Edinburgh Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
This delectable Prom hid behind the title "To Soothe the Aching Heart" the failsafe concept of a programme of the world’s favourite opera extracts, plus some. Take six British opera stars – three sopranos, two tenors and a mezzo – and assign them the business of comforting us all.Whether you felt soothed by what followed wasn’t really the point; this was a gulp-it-down sundae of a Monday night, a feast of indulgence in which the singers, who probably needed comforting too after more than a year of cancelled contracts, simply gave everything, mixing, matching and sometimes hitting the high Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s hard to know where to start with this chaotic Hansel and Gretel, and not just because Humperdinck’s opera has been cut, spliced and re-stitched with a brand-new libretto, new characters and multi-track, multi-option audio. The restless, competing ideas, the gaudy design, the ill-judged tone, the fussy technology all conspire against the performers, who produce some fine singing despite everything.What makes it all the more enraging is the fact that, as British Youth Opera’s CEO Nicola Candlish reminded us before the performance, these near-professionals have, in many cases, lost months Read more ...
David Nice
The love of power corrupts, the power of love falters or fails. The essence of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is also what Graham Vick communicated so stunningly in many of his unforgettable productions with his Birmingham Opera Company (Khovanskygate in a big top and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in a disused nightclub were perhaps the most revelatory experiences of my opera-going life to date).This spring he embarked on RhineGold, unusual venue then to be confirmed, but fell ill with Covid and died, aged only 67, on 17 July – the biggest personal shock of the time for many of us. Richard Willacy, Read more ...
David Nice
“Time-travelling” is how Enrique Mazzola, the superb first conductor of Glyndebourne’s last new production of the main season, described the slow-burn trajectory of Verdi’s semi-masterpiece Luisa Miller in his First Person here on theartsdesk. Possibly it’s more a case of conservative opera-by-numbers evolving into something truly deep and personal – ultimately two duets and a final scene among the very best in Verdi’s substantial output. In most of the first two acts, you simply need five of the best voices to pull focus and a production that doesn’t get in the way too much.That happened Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There are advantages and disadvantages about opera-in-the-round, and it’s a format that suits some operas better than others. Longborough’s Cunning Little Vixen, staged by Olivia Fuchs in their new big-top tent, makes the very most of the advantages and pushes the disadvantages into the shade, without entirely obliterating them. It’s a lively show, very well sung, cleverly, energetically acted and directed; but the problems, of which more below, refuse quite to go away.This is a production under the festival’s Emerging Artists scheme combined with its Youth Chorus, and I have to say that it’s Read more ...
Enrique Mazzola
It is difficult to know why some operas succeed while others remain unknown. The reasons can be emotional or historical, or it might be as simple as a poor cast who couldn’t quite launch the opera into the stars. In the case of Luisa Miller, we have the perfect example of a masterpiece which has been a little bit neglected. As an Italian and a bel canto lover, I have no answer for why it is not more widely known and loved.Just two or three years after writing Luisa Miller, Giuseppe Verdi went from being a very important Italian composer to the most important Italian composer of all. This was Read more ...
David Nice
Now that the summer opera-house companies have pulled off staged triumphs under the most difficult of circumstances, it’s time to celebrate semi-al-fresco concerts. Not so many have cropped up as I’d hoped after the success of the Battersea Park Bandstand Chamber Music series last year. The Wigmore Hall made a start in nearby Portman Square and we have a host of impressive August events planned by Bold Tendencies in Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park, building on the successes of 2020. Opera Holland Park's dazzling mini-festival of song, dreamed up by enterprising baritone Julien Van Mellaerts Read more ...
David Nice
Play it straight and you’ll get more laughs: that’s the standard advice on great operatic comedies like the masterpieces of the Gilbert & Sullivan canon, Britten’s Albert Herring, Verdi’s Falstaff, Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. In comparison, for all its musical sparkle, Rossini’s Le Comte Ory may have amusing situations, but zero psychological insight into the characters, and plods along for the first half of Act One with very little intrinsic humour. So only the pious should have an issue with Cal “One Man, Two Guvnors” Crystal for camping and vamping it up; and what a gift he has in a Read more ...
David Nice
Instant sell-out would have been guaranteed if the Royal Opera had advertised this as “Cardiff Singer of the World finalist Masabane and fellow Young Artists”. No doubt about it, South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha is indeed the most polished performer, crying out star quality in every move and note. But that’s not the point. These singers have bonded through a difficult year or two, and they all have so much to offer, if also in some cases some way to go.The Royal Opera mentoring culminated on Saturday afternoon in a showcase of operatic scenes where they got to work with Read more ...
Richard Bratby
They showed Clash of the Titans the other night – not the wretched remake, but the original 1981 sword-and-sandals cheesefest, complete with Ray Harryhausen’s Kraken, Ursula Andress as Aphrodite and that rip-roaring Laurence Rosenthal score. And, of course, Sir Laurence Olivier playing Zeus and keeping it old school as he and his nightdress-clad fellow deities debate mortal destinies in Shakespearean tones, from an Olympus that resembles nothing so much as the old Blue Peter set plus Ionic columns. We don’t do the classics like that any more, and especially not in opera where Graeco Roman Read more ...