Opera
stephen.walsh
Whatever might be said about Longborough Festival’s first live opera since 2019, the first and most important thing is to praise the company without reservation for putting on a show of anything like this quality in the face of obstacles of the sort that normally confront the heroes of Russian fairy tales.So: no kissing, embracing or even approaching within two metres in an opera that begins with twins falling passionately, violently in love, and ends with Wotan literally kissing away Brünnhilde’s immortality (pictuted below, Paul Carey Jones at the end of the opera). So: general distancing Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The new Glyndebourne production of Rossini's Il turco in Italia has a truly winning smile on its face and a spring and a dance in its musical step. It is brimful of fun and good ideas, conveying the sense that a lot of joy has been had in its making. As one cast member tweeted during rehearsals a couple of weeks ago: "I have not stopped laughing and living my best life all day."That sense of joy definitely isn’t confined to the cast; the audience were clearly loving every moment of it at last night’s premiere, and with good reason. Once this production has had its 13 performances this season Read more ...
David Nice
Angels and birds throng the inner life of tragic heroine Katya Kabanova, very much centre-stage in Nikolay Ostrovsky’s The Storm and achingly so in Janáček’s musical portrait. Director Damiano Michieletto takes the feathers, adds cages and claustrophobic white walls, and makes the symbolism the thing. Trouble is, both play and opera insist on some equivalence of the milieu – stifling life in a conventional merchant’s house ruled with melodramatic harshness by a dragon mother-in-law versus the open air, be it summer in a garden at night or the call of the Volga. The human drama is insisted Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This isn’t an opera review, because Current, Rising is not an opera. What it is, however, is the most convincing example yet that Virtual Reality arts might not just be possible, but desirable – an experience that glances beyond gimmick towards genuinely new territory.Billed as “the world’s first hyper reality opera”, Current, Rising is a 15-minute, walk-through installation housed in the what the makers have nicknamed the “opera tardis” in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Theatre. The credits give some sense of the scope of a project that brings together a university, software developers, Read more ...
David Nice
It looked as if the Royal Opera might be trying to keep its distance with the first new production since lockdown. After all, Mozart’s last opera – only the Overture and March of the Priests in The Magic Flute remained to be composed in the fatal year of 1791 after the 18 days spent working on Tito – seems to have been fairly minimally staged for Emperor Leopold II's Prague coronation as King of Bohemia. When the composer’s widow Constanze revived the work after his death, it was as a series of concert performances (with Beethoven playing a Mozart concerto between the acts on at least one Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
We may not be in the EU any more, but geographically and culturally we can celebrate being part of Europe as much as we jolly well like. For Europe Day, the European Parliament Liaison Office, the Camōes Institute, the Embassy of Portugal and the Delegation of the EU in the UK staged a special lunchtime concert at St John’s Smith Square, given by the Northern Chords Festival Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Bloxham. The ensemble is from Bloxham’s eponymous festival in the north east, sporting 12 different European nationalities and a larger number beyond that continent. In its ranks you Read more ...
David Nice
I only saw Christa Ludwig twice live in concert, but those appearances epitomise her incredible dramatic and vocal rage as well as her peerless artistry in everything she did. The first event was Schubert’s Winterreise with pianist Charles Spencer at the Southbank Centre, at a time when it was less common for women to take on the role of the heavy-hearted wayfarer: the intensity still resonates. The second time was when she played the one-buttocked, easily-assimilated Old Lady in Bernstein’s Candide, conducted by the composer in his last Barbican concerts: the joie de vivre went beyond the Read more ...
David Nice
There are so many good ideas, so much talented hard work from the singers of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and two dancers, such a cinematic use of the Royal Opera House, that Isabelle Kettle’s interweaving of two Brecht/Weill mini masterpieces ought to work better than it does. In jettisoning much about the fantastical scenarios of flawed human beings on quests to make or spend money in paradises that turn out to be hells, favouring instead the deconstruction of female and male archetypes, you need to be clear about your intentions, streamline their presentation. Too often here Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Some production concepts seem so obvious, in retrospect, that you wonder why they haven’t been tried more often. Traffic hums in the foreground in the opening shots of Grange Park Opera’s new film of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, the passing cars reflected in the window of an antique clock dealer’s store. Ticking fills the soundtrack as we dive inside, like Mr Benn entering his magical shop; at the same time, the piano sounds Ravel’s perfumed opening chords. Reality or fiction? Opera or documentary? Torquemada’s clock shop is apparently genuine, and the setting could be any 21st century high Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The team of Stephen Langridge (director), Alison Chitty (design) and Paul Pyant (lighting) produced a quietly radical Parsifal at the Royal Opera in 2013, finding both beauty and horror in unexpected corners. On the strength of its third instalment – I haven’t seen the first two – their Ring in Gothenburg pursues a no less subtle course of rebellion against some tenaciously held conventions and traditions in staging Wagner.This is billed as a “green” Ring by an environmentally friendly opera house. It’s a notion which, I fancy, would have intrigued Wagner the theorist, dreamer and pragmatist Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The screen lights up, the Zoom link connects and there, blinking back at you (30% awkward, 70% enthusiastic) is a familiar face. Is it definitely working? Can you hear me? What do we say now? God, I'm getting old. Even after 12 months of conversation through webcams it still feels forced to me; something to one side of real life, simultaneously weird and routine, intimate and alienating, even as memories of the Old Normal grow increasingly remote. Is that a piano? Well, why not, these days? And then the face on the screen – I knew I recognised him; it’s the tenor Joseph Doody, who I last saw Read more ...
David Nice
Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time stalk this haunting dream of a Rosenkavalier. The love games of teenager Octavian and his experienced mistress the Marschallin are sexy and plausible; the comedy of ridiculous Baron Ochs keeps a low profile, but stays real and turns out funny in unexpected places; a winged old gentleman (Ingmar Thilo) embodies the second and fourth manifestations. Does he make up for all the detail in the minor and non-singing roles shed by director Barrie Kosky? For me, yes. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss, firmly rooted in the detail of a mid-18th century Read more ...