Opera
Anna Lucia Richter
It’s actually quite a strange feeling to know that my CD Il delirio della passione is now out. I recorded this amazing, all-embracing Monteverdi project with Luca Pianca and Ensemble Claudiana over a year ago, in January 2020. That was another world, another time. At that point, PPE and masks belonged in hospitals, we greeted each other with hugs and many of us musicians were known to groan at the prospect of months of busy touring – a luxury now. I regarded myself a true soprano and my calendar was pretty full for the next two years. Had my future self visited me and told me that I would be Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
A word about grief. Many of us have learned a lot about it this past year; many knew about it before that. When someone we love dies, we grieve. This is normal. This is human. It is agony, but it’s not actually a mental illness. Having Paul, the hero (or anti-hero) of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt be marched off stage by those in white coats at the end is therefore not only a directorial cop-out. It also prevents this overwhelmingly emotional opera from doing what it does best: providing catharsis. Premiered in 1920 in a world shattered by the First World War and the Read more ...
David Nice
Young performers seeking platforms for their careers have had it especially rough over the past year, most slipping through the financial-support net and now facing the further blow of the Brexit visa debacle. So it’s always good to welcome quality streamings supporting their progress. The Royal Opera has kept its Jette Parker Young Artists regularly in the public eye – we’ve got to know and care about many of them – while Barbara Hannigan’s recently-launched Momentum project teams up new talent with more established performers, as happens in the Blackheath/Leeds Lieder Brahms special (three Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Bavarian State Opera has led the way for live performances and associated broadcasts during the pandemic. Their series of weekly “Montagsstück” events have presented innovative chamber operas, specifically for web streaming. Their next goal is full-size opera with a live audience. That is not possible yet, so instead they are premiering a new production of Weber’s Der Freischütz. Initially it is just for the cameras, but when the doors finally open, it will be ready to go.The production is directed and designed by Dmitri Tcherniakov. He has spent the last 20 years cultivating a reputation as Read more ...
David Nice
Christmas isn’t just for Christmas, Daisy Evans’s bargain-basement fir-trees-and-tinsel production of Humperdinck’s evergreen masterpiece seems to be telling us. Filmed in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal last December, the February online premiere doesn’t exactly, as she claims in her intro, tell us “why live theatre is valuable” - hint: it isn't, wasn't streamed live - though sure enough, we’re all “desperate to get back to it” (who’s applauding at the end, incidentally? There can’t have been an audience). I’d skip the first three minutes of sales pitch and go straight to the Overture.Which, with a Read more ...
Nicky Spence
Forget the pandemic, it's Brexit which could ring the death knell for artists who are currently hoarse from begging to be taken seriously as a respected export. From Tchaikovsky to Britten, music itself has always been offered visa free but as the repercussions of Brexit are truly felt in the UK, the stories I've collected below from my singing colleagues highlight our increasingly vulnerable position as artists.Thinking back to summer jobs selling tequila on the strips of Magaluf and now selling a Schöne Müllerin to a tentatively packed auditorium in Barcelona, the annexes negotiated in the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Though the global pandemic has brought about an unprecedented degree of isolation, it’s also, in unusual ways, brought us together too. Visiting New York’s Metropolitan Opera House is currently an impossible dream - the house is still completely dark. However, that’s not stopping the Met from bringing a wealth of concerts from across the world to a global audience. Some of its biggest names, including Joyce DiDonato, Bryn Terfel and Jonas Kaufmann, have given recitals from locations as unique as a historic Washington mansion, a castle in Oslo and Brecon Cathedral in Wales. Saturday’s recital Read more ...
David Nice
It’s second time lucky for OperaGlass Works, whose previous production at Wilton’s Music Hall, of Stravinsky’s The Rake's Progress, hit the mark for me in the singing but not the staging. I suspect that had we been there in the auditorium with performers all too palpable, the same might have been true of The Turn of the Screw in this venue. But Britten’s tricky adaptation with Myfanwy Piper of the ambiguous, first-person-narrated Henry James ghost story, a musical masterpiece, works best here when the camerawork allows distance on the ghosts of the former valet and governess who haunt Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Death, be not proud, though some have called thee/ Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so.” John Donne’s Holy Sonnets may summon all his art of wit and paradox to mock that might and dread; still, we sense the abject terror behind the formal acrobatics of the verse. Benjamin Britten wrote his great settings of these great poems after a visit to the liberated Bergen-Belsen camp with Yehudi Menuhin in summer 1945. A muted howl of anguish flecked with sparks of hope, they make for a mesmerically chilling song-cycle. As sung by tenor Richard Dowling, accompanied by pianist Ian Tindale and Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A darkened stage; a pool of light; a solitary figure. And then, flooding the whole thing with meaning, music – even it’s just a soft chord on a piano. It’s no secret to any opera goer that even the barest outlines of a staging can magnify the dramatic potential of a piece of music to a point when it can seem like a completely new work. And if – like English Touring Opera’s director James Conway – you’ve spent much of the 21st century creating large-scale drama in small venues with minimal resources; well, it all starts to look deceptively easy. Conway makes a pairing of two song cycles by Read more ...
David Nice
Surreal fantasy came off best this year, before and after the fall. It seems like a decade ago when audiences of all ages were packed tight to crack up - or not get it - at Covent Garden for the UK stage premiere of Gerald Barry's Alice's Adventures Under Ground in a tirelessly resourceful production by director/designer Antony McDonald. Another brief flourish to a much smaller Royal Opera House audience in October reached many more spectators online with the realisation of the house's new Director of Opera Oliver Mears' idea for staging song cycles/cantatas in the dazzling 4/4 sequence.In Read more ...
David Nice
So Hansel and Gretel can’t cuddle up together in the dark forest, Musetta doesn’t fall into long-suffering lover Marcello’s arms and there’s no audience to play to (as there would have been three days earlier). No matter: the Christmas-tree-grown-enormous from the stalwart production of The Nutcracker keeps us gaping, the singers young, established and old duly deliver and Mark Wigglesworth elicits sweep and brio from a substantial Royal Opera Orchestra.Up to this point, Royal Opera film presentation in its streamed events has been impeccable. Filming and lighting are once again first rate, Read more ...