Opera
Christopher Lambton
Scotland was at the cutting edge of culture in 1988, when the Edinburgh International Festival hosted the UK premiere of Nixon in China in the Houston Grand Opera production at the cavernous Playhouse. John Adams’ first opera, documenting the historic meeting between Richard Nixon and Mao Tse-tung in 1972, was about as hot off the press as you can get, having been premiered in the USA only the year before, and came to Scotland with most of the original cast in the now iconic production directed by Peter Sellars.Over 30 years later, for Scottish Opera to mount its first production of Nixon is Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Once upon a time writing an opera was first and foremost a question of choosing a good story. But times move on, and today – as Nicholas Till reminds us in a fascinating programme note for Philip Venables’s and Ted Huffman’s new chamber opera – the medium is the message, and the how has become at least as important as the what. Denis and Katya is a sort of dramatisation of a recent incident (as the police would call it) in Russia in which two 15-year-olds ran away from home, barricaded themselves in her stepfather’s summer retreat, and eventually – after a shoot-out with police – either Read more ...
David Nice
Those who booed the production team last night - there was nothing but generous cheering for singers, conductor and orchestra - might reflect that this was at least regietheater, that singular brand of not-all-bad director's opera in Germany, with discipline and purpose close enough to its subject. There were some cliches and the occasional question-mark - who's the trembling, plastic-wrapped youth in underpants and why the nearby oil drum? - but you had to hand it to Barbora Horáková for making everything connect, in however stylised a way.Think back to Daniel Kramer's party nightmare in La Read more ...
David Nice
Could English National Opera be about to right the wrong done to a national treasure? Elizabeth Llewellyn was Brixton born - with what she calls a usual childhood, recorders and chime bars at primary school, followed by special opportunities at a secondary independent girls’ school which had “a lot of everything, sport, music, debating”, then on to the Royal Northern College of Music “where I really was very much the runt of the litter” but is now a Fellow - National Opera Centre trained and Peter Moores Foundation funded. She made a huge impression at the Coliseum as Mimì in a 2010 revival Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s not hard to see why The Sicilian Vespers has struggled since its surprisingly successful opening run at the Paris Opéra in 1855. Verdi had composed it reluctantly, despised the librettist, Eugène Scribe, who he regarded as a well-named cynical scribbler, and tried unsuccessfully to get a release from his contract. The result is undeniably patchy, narratively implausible to the point of silliness, and though tight by the standards of French grand opera, nevertheless at least one scene too long.Yet having said all that, one is left with the impression of a work that overall only just Read more ...
David Nice
"About as much fun as you can have with your clothes on," promised a member of the two Royal Opera casts teamworking their way through multiple roles and costume changes for what in effect is Alice's Adventures Under Ground and Through the Looking Glass in under an hour. He's not wrong; and I haven't ever cried laughing with my clothes off, as I did, fully dressed, both here and in Gerald Barry's even more counter-intuitive operatic whizz through The Importance of Being Earnest. A 2016 concert performance of what turns out to be the second instalment in an Anglo-Irish classic trilogy from the Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Wigmore Hall audiences don’t usually roar. But when a star soprano who has already made her mark at the world’s major opera houses pays a visit, they do. This was the Albanian-born and now New York-based soprano Ermonela Jaho’s debut at the hall, an event which also marked the opening of the 50th anniversary year of Opera Rara, with whom Jaho has an extremely fruitful collaboration. The concert had been fitted into the Wigmore Hall’s programme at relatively short notice and sold out quickly.The moments that brought on the most vociferous baying from the packed house were opera extracts, Read more ...
David Nice
Of Wagner's four Ring operas, Siegfried poses the biggest casting problem. Most heroic tenors with the lungs to last the evening are not going to be ideal incarnations of the stroppy adolescent who learns and fights his way through an often nightmarish fairy-tale landscape. Torsten Kerl, not an agile mover to say the least, certainly wasn't. But complemented by similarly strong vocal performances of varying degrees of dramatic expressivity, and above all perfectly supported by the iridescent safety net of the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski, who show clarity of Read more ...
Robert Beale
Kurt Weill’s “Broadway opera” – his own preferred description – is an extraordinary and brilliant piece of work. Its music ranges from the seriously dramatic to fun numbers like the "Ice Cream Sextet" and the jitterbug dance song “Moon Faced, Starry Eyed”; there’s a lot of spoken-dialogue-with-music, as well as solos, duets and all manner of ensembles; and the story is both comic and tragic.Written in 1947, it pictures life in a New York tenement – and on the street outside – on two sweltering summer days and nights. The climax comes when a jealous husband murders his wife. As tragedy Read more ...
David Nice
Admirable as it was of the London Philharmonic Orchestra to launch its concerts in 2020 with a performance celebrating the Ravi Shankar centenary, the hard fact remains that this lively spectacle might have worked better without two-thirds of its players. The often thick scoring of Sukanya, fine for the Kathak dance sequences vibrantly choreographed by Gauri Diwakar, meant that the operatic voices needed amplifying, and that often resulted in hard edges where the music suggested a luminous or vibrant spirituality.Still, Sukanya should be here to stay, and would reach larger audiences around Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You can see the temptation. With three different versions and four different overtures to choose from, as well as all that spoken dialogue to cut, substitute or omit, Beethoven’s Fidelio has always been a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of opera – a work, like Hamlet, that we shape and reshape in our own image. With so much agency available, so many fissures and footholds in this troubled piece, perhaps it was inevitable that someone would go all the way, jettison the score entirely and start from scratch.This is exactly what Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang has done. His prisoner of Read more ...
Susanna Hurrell
In 2010, my best friend and I made a whimsical decision to go backpacking in India over the Easter break. I had developed an interest in Eastern philosophy through exposure to the teachings of the ancient Vedas, and through the practice of Transcendental Meditation, so I jumped on the opportunity to experience the culture that gave birth to so much wisdom and ancient knowledge.I went with stars in my eyes and was shocked to discover it was nothing like the romantic India of my imagination. It was louder, more aggressive, more heavily polluted and far more chaotic. On our first night, in a run Read more ...