Opera
David Nice
There's no question about my top opera choice for 2019, especially since the London houses rarely delivered at the same pitch of engagement. It's Graham Vick's walkabout Birmingham Opera Company spectacular, a production of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk that worked on every level. Literally, since a full City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alpesh Chauhan - doing superlative work in the absence of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, on maternity leave - was on a raised platform and some of the action took place at other points around the disco-lit, dilipidated Tower Ballroom on the Read more ...
David Nice
"Sadler's Wells! Any more for Peter Grimes, the sadistic fisherman?," a cheery bus conductor is alleged to have called out around the time of this towering masterpiece's premiere in 1945. The side of a "Grimes bus" today would probably proclaim over Britten and the work itself the "brand" of two stalwart perfomers - conductor Edward Gardner and leading protagonist Stuart Skelton, dominant forces of the opera over the last ten years.With English National Opera and more recently presenting his Bergen Philharmonic as one of the finest orchestras in the world - last night's concert performance Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Doctor, writer, sculptor, curator, comedian, presenter and director, Sir Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was one of the mighty cultural and intellectual omnivores of our age. To those of a musical or theatrical bent, however, Miller was above all one of the greatest of British opera directors, whose many collaborations with the English National Opera - whether in his mafia Rigoletto, his Edwardian Mikado or the sitcom-sharpness of his Barber of Seville - resulted in the most enduringly popular operatic productions in British history. In 2012, as he returned to the ENO with a Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Death in Venice is usually a dark and claustrophobic affair. It lends itself to small-scale staging with minimal props and suggestive, low-key lighting. But for this new production at the Royal Opera, director David McVicar has taken a different approach. He has used all the resources at the company’s disposal to create a more expansive vision. The results are suitably psychological, and atmospheric too, but a greater focus on dance and an ingenious set bring movement and flow to every scene. McVicar knows how to direct his singers too, and the near ideal casting for the two leads, Mark Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like almost everything that it touches these days, English National Opera’s autumn season of shows rooted in the Orpheus myth has enjoyed a fairly mixed reception. The company’s programme of visits to the Underworld concludes with another high-risk journey: Philip Glass’s 1993 opera Orphée, inspired by the 1950 film that Jean Cocteau spun from his own earlier drama on this theme. From the off, as director Netia Jones (in her ENO debut) tells us, Glass and Cocteau have drawn us into a hall of endlessly reflecting mirrors, a game of shadows and doubles in which each story and treatment of the Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The Beggar’s Opera: does any piece of music theatre promise more fun and deliver more tedium? Yes, it was the satirical smash of 1728; yes, it inspired Brecht and Weill; yes, with its combination of popular melodies and a topical script it was effectively the world’s first jukebox musical. I get all that. I'm fortunate enough to live with an historian of 18th century theatre. Seriously: we talk about John Rich and Colley Cibber over breakfast. Yet time and again, as another thicket of Georgian slang gives way to another blink-and-you-miss-it musical number, I’ve found myself thinking of David Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s hard to believe that in 1824 there were no fewer than six productions of Weber’s Der Freischütz in London alone. Since then this colourful piece of German Romanticism hasn’t fared nearly so well, disappearing from the UK’s opera houses not just for years but decades at a time.Fortunately concert halls (in London at any rate) have stepped enthusiastically into the breach, and after last night’s latest concert outing – an imported performance by Laurence Equilbey’s Paris-based Insula Orchestra (pictured below) and Accentus choir – you have to wonder whether maybe this isn’t for the best.If Read more ...
David Nice
Advance publicity overstated the case for The Mask of Orpheus. "Iconic"? Only to academics and acolytes, for British audiences haven't had a chance to see a production since ENO's world premiere run in 1986. "Masterpiece"? Sitting there after the second interval 33 years ago, surrounded by empty seats long vacated (by fellow critics, shame on them, among others), and facing a third act with a sense of fatigue, I hardly thought so then. And though I can hear the virtues more clearly now, the dead directorial hand of Daniel Kramer has turned an already complex, sometimes obscure layering of Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Venetian director Damiano Michieletto’s new Royal Opera production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale is a clever and entertaining mix of old and new. The curtain rises to reveal a skeleton of a 1960s style house - there are doors, but no walls, revealing a gleaming white vintage car parked outside. The roof and chimney are formed of strip lights like an architect's sketch hanging in mid air and completing the picture. It would be striking if you could get a proper look at it, but the sheer brightness of the lighting - inconveniently placed between the stage and the supertitles - is a tad strenuous Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Considering that Janáček’s Vixen is, among other things, an allegory of the passing and returning years, it’s appropriate that WNO continue to recycle David Pountney’s now nearly 40-year-old production, and that it comes up each time refreshed, with this or that altered or added detail, but quantum-like the same general image. This second night was like a mass family outing, perhaps because of the associated outreach event, the designs for which adorned the foyer. Children all over the place, onstage (of course), and in the audience, helped create a particularly lively, inspiring atmosphere. Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Maybe some British opera houses just don’t get operetta. Without wit, lightness and snappy pace, cudgelling us with desperate relevance, the frothiest works crash to earth stone cold dead. There have been disasters elsewhere, too, though ENO is the chief culprit, and (after a miserable Merry Widow and a fearful Fledermaus) this one is the nail in the coffenbach. If you think that’s a bad joke, wait til you hear the ones on stage.In the myth of Orpheus, the demigod’s bride, Eurydice, dies of a snakebite; he goes to Hades to persuade the god of the underworld, through Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Almost exactly a century after the Weimar Republic’s constitution took effect, English Touring Opera presents a show whose birth coincided with the Republic's untimely death. His third collaboration with the prolific, maverick playwright Georg Kaiser, Kurt Weill’s The Silver Lake (Der Silbersee) opened in three German cities (Leipzig, Magdeburg and Erfurt) just 19 days after Hitler had come to power in 1933. Although it lacks much of the acid topicality and mischief that marks Weill’s partnerships with Bertolt Brecht, that did not stop the newly-empowered Nazis from swiftly closing the Read more ...