Opera
David Nice
“If this is love, then why have I fought it?” The stock romantic-comedy prevarications had a Greenwich Village setting in Bernstein’s Wonderful Town at Opera Holland Park less than two weeks ago. Last night, the place was nominally Alsace but the style totally Italianate. To adapt another line from the same Bernstein song, “You know it when you hear it” – and with OHP’s utterly dependable and authentic Italian tenor Matteo Lippi as the hero of Mascagni’s light-hearted but still passionate love story, that was guaranteed. More of a surprise was the utterly idiomatic style of the City of London Read more ...
Robert Beale
Harnessing the enthusiasm of youth has always been what Clonter Opera, on a farm in Cheshire, is about with its summer productions. The house is relatively small (there’s always a reduced orchestration as accompaniment), and the idea is that promising young voices can get a chance to try their luck with an audience and learn in the process.It's been notably successful in the past, as star after star has taken the first steps towards a durable career under the care of Clonter’s music staff and directors. This production was no exception: in fact the maturity of the lower male voices on display Read more ...
David Nice
Gorgeous woodland romp, a tale of a vivacious, independent-minded young lady-into-fox objectified by three ageing, disillusioned men or a parable of natural regeneration? The different levels of Janáček’s one-off fantasy, from strip-cartoon origins to wise philosophy, are hard to hold in balance. Director Stephen Barlow sketches the possibilities but no more, meeting many of the veteran composer’s seething orchestral passages with a dramatic blank. That accepted, you simply revel in what a reduced orchestra can achieve under the very impressive Jessica Cottis, and focus hard on some Read more ...
Robert Beale
“Remember me!”, sang Dido to a departed Aeneas in the heart-rending aria-chaconne announcing her demise that dominates the ending of Purcell’s baroque opera. But what if he did … if in fact he never could forget her? That’s the premise behind Errollyn Wallen’s Dido’s Ghost, a work incorporating almost all of the original Purcell score but dovetailing it into a full-length chamber opera of her own, with accompaniments from a combination of the instruments required for Purcell and some much more modern ones including xylophone and other percussion, and an electric bass guitar. Performed by Read more ...
Robert Beale
How would you solve the problems inherent in a production of Malcolm Arnold’s The Dancing Master, bearing in mind the need for social distancing for performers, comparatively miniscule budgets for scenery and props, and the uncertainty surrounding just about everything in a summer opera festival these days? Do it on the radio, of course. Educating Rita’s solution to a weighty academic question proves a very practical one for Susan Moore, director and designer of Buxton International Festival’s revival – the first professional production it has ever had and closely based on a recent CD Read more ...
David Nice
When the history of 2021’s slow emergence from lockdown comes to be written, musical administrations will stand out among the heroes. That’s especially true of the country-house opera organisations which have mushroomed in recent years. Don’t ask where some of the money comes from, or who it’s for, but celebrate for now how much work these set-ups have given top-notch singers, players and production teams, many of whom have hardly worked in the previous 14 months. Michael Chance at The Grange Festival has had a particularly tough time – we don’t know the half of it, though I learnt a little Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
In Handel’s operas (as, indeed, elsewhere in art and life) the worst witch may turn out to have the best character. Without the sorceress Melissa, splendidly full of evil ruses yet endowed with a generous measure of tragic pathos, Amadigi di Gaula might freeze into a static amorous stand-off between pasteboard nobles contending with a harsh – then, suddenly, kindly – fate.Thank goodness that Irish soprano Anna Devin, as the lovelorn enchantress, graces Netia Jones's ingenious if somewhat hyper-active production of Handel’s 1715 heroic romance in Garsington Opera’s pavilion at Wormsley. In a Read more ...
David Nice
A massive musical hope for the future is what we all need right now, after 14 stop/semi-start months and a threatened decimation of the concert and opera scene, the danger of which isn't over yet. This year’s BBC Cardiff Singer of the World delivered that hope in frissons and plenty of tear-inducing moments, even though the live audience in St David’s Hall consisted of only three empathetic judges. Mezzo Jamie Barton was a clear winner in 2013; the next two singers to take the ultimate prize were more controversial (neither was my first choice); this year, any one among a stunning trio out of Read more ...
David Nice
All 15 of Rimsky-Korsakov’s operas deserve to be seen and heard live at least once, though not all of them need staging. Veteran director David Pountney’s bold choice for Grange Park Opera actually gives us two, a prologue reworked as music-drama and the action of 15 years later, exclusive subject of the original and final versions of his first opera; for this Russian-opera trainspotter, that leaves only two more to tick off the list – Pan Voyevoda and Servilia (fine music, fusty ancient Roman plot). The dramaturgy of what's known here as Ivan the Terrible is peculiar, the action lopsided, Read more ...
David Nice
Whatever else happens on the country opera scene this summer, the golden rose award for sheer chutzpah goes to the ever-ambitious Garsington team in pulling this off in no small style. Planning any production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s intricate 1911 “comedy for music” is daring at the best of times; in the still-shaky Covid era, the decision to go ahead might have seemed foolhardy. The life-saver would seem to have been Eberhard Kloke’s reduced orchestration of the 100-plus-players original, briefly annoying in places where a piano substitutes for instruments still Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Loudly and painfully, the consumptive Violetta wheezes before we hear a single note. Her pitiful gasping for the breath that deserts her precedes the prelude to Opera Holland Park’s La traviata; the same effect ushers in Act Three. At first I assumed that director Rodula Gaitanou had tweaked her 2018 production for its post-lockdown comeback but, no – the original staging featured this device. That uncannily prescient stroke apart, Gaitanou lays a light but skilful hand on a work that, even in non-pandemic times, needs no fancy manipulation from concept merchants impatient of its power and Read more ...
David Nice
Peasant harvesters enter from the facsimile of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington garden to the right (stage left) of the state-of-the-art pavilion and, splendidly led by a solo tenor (Dominick Felix), burst into song. The temptation is to burst into tears, for this is the first time, surely, any of us has heard a rich, full chorus live for over a year. From the pit, the Philharmonia players, a day after their Festival Hall triumph with Esa-Pekka Salonen, sound as lush as you could possibly want in Tchaikovsky’s glorious score, and if all bar one of the principals aren’t quite ideal, the Read more ...