Opera
Gavin Dixon
No great innovations in this Seraglio – as ETO are styling Mozart’s early Singspiel (its full title in translation is The Abduction from the Seraglio – but a traditional staging that makes the most of all the work’s characters and quirks. Mozart’s evocation of an exotic, and unknown, Oriental world is perfectly rendered by director Stephen Medcalf, who finds an ideal balance between the various love interests and the regular invitations to slapstick comedy. He does it all with a light touch, and with a real focus on the characters – all well cast. Sets are modest – it’s a touring show – but Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
English National Opera chose a curiously low-key production to open their season. Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice has only three singing roles and very little action. For this production, Wayne McGregor has reimagined the work as an opera/dance hybrid. That brings a valuable dynamic element to Gluck’s stately discourses, but there are few interpretive insights here, and the almost non-existent sets made more demands on the dance than even McGregor’s sophisticated choreography could sustain.The opera itself contains many ballet numbers, so the dance element makes sense. And McGregor resists the Read more ...
David Nice
She was recording Carmen in Paris, and the Radio France auditorium was packed with the press, asking such dazzling questions as "have you been up the Eiffel Tower yet?" and "what do you think of the French men?". I thought, given the statuesque approach, it might be best to wonder if there was a nobility in the characterisation. Jessye Norman refined it to "dignity" and enlarged graciously on that (I can no longer find the transcript or the printed feature). The end result in Seiji Ozawa's Philips recording was far from the expected improbability. The soprano could always float a line, and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Considering the doubtfulness of its underlying idea, James Macdonald’s production of Rigoletto has shown remarkable staying power since its Cardiff début 17 years ago. It’s true that this particular opera - which, unlike one or two others of Verdi’s, was premiered in its correct Mantuan setting - does to some extent lend itself to relocation in time and place, as Jonathan Miller’s famous mafioso production for ENO once showed. But Kennedy’s White House remains tricky, involving absurdities beyond even those (not inconsiderable) in the original. So why does it survive? I’d hate to think Read more ...
David Nice
Could Gerald Barry's first opera really be as enervating in the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre as it seemed nearly 30 years ago at its Almeida Music Festival premiere? Since then we've become accustomed to wonder at, even love, the Barry style with its shrills and jitters, at least in its wacky takes on known treasures like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Importance of Being Earnest - in operatic form, the funniest operatic comedy since Britten's Albert Herring - and Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Here, though, Vincent Deane's baffling fantasia on creativity and singing in mid- Read more ...
David Nice
It was said of the Venetian audiences randy for the satirical antique of Handel's first great operatic cornucopia in 1709 that "a stranger who should have seen the manner in which they were affected, would have imagined they were all distracted". The same could be said of spectators witnessing this Royal Opera cast for Agrippina going way over the top, and mostly not in the best way: surprising given the rigour with which Barrie Kosky usually directs his singers. Remember - once seen, who could forget it? - Max Reinhardt's visually beautiful film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
You can love Carmen as much as you like (as much as I do, for instance), and still have a certain sympathy for the poor director who has to find something new to say about a work so anchored in a particular style and place. For all its musical and dramatic brilliance, Bizet’s piece is a litter of stereotypes: the wild gipsy girl, the village ingénue, the strutting toreador, the smugglers (all forty or fifty of them), the Spanish dancers, the castanets, the wiggling hips.Jo Davies’s non-solution to this problem is to relocate the work from Seville to somewhere in Brazil - though I only know Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Goethe’s Die Leiden des junges Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was a vital spark in the ignition of the German romantic movement. The story of a young man driven to kill himself for love of a woman, Charlotte, who loves him but marries someone else out of duty to her family, it was first published in 1774. It triggered a fever across Europe ranging from fashion trends (Werther wears blue with a yellow waistcoat) to a spate of copycat suicides. Among its admirers were Beethoven, Brahms, Napoleon and Frankenstein’s Monster. Strange that the only operatic version is by Jules Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Kasper Holten left a mixed bag of productions behind at Royal Opera when he left in 2017, but the best of them - though not all my colleagues on The Arts Desk have agreed - is this Don Giovanni, now back for its latest revival.Visually, the production is stunning. The set (designer Es Devlin) is a full-sized house, onto which videos are projected (video designer Luke Halls). The house rotates, and the projections follow, a high-tech effect that manages to keep the eye tricked for the entire length of the opera. The two storeys of the house create a double-tier set. The action typically takes Read more ...
graham.rickson
Martinů's The Greek Passion is a bold choice as a season opener, all the more so given that Opera North are staging the rarely-seen original version of his 1957 opera. Commissioned for Covent Garden then shabbily ditched, this is faster moving and more cinematic than the radically rewritten edition performed in Zurich two years after Martinů's death in 1959. Based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s bestseller Christ Recrucified, it’s now alarmingly pertinent, a tale of refugees arriving in a small Greek village preparing to stage an Easter Passion play.Christopher Alden’s powerful, spare staging has many Read more ...
Nicky Spence
I’m a big fanboy of Czech music, Janáček and Martinů especially, but I’d never seen The Greek Passion before being cast as Manolios in Opera North’s new production, as it remains quite a rarity in the opera house. For those who don’t know the work, it tells of a group of refugees who arrive in a village as the residents there are preparing for their Easter Passion Play. Martinů explores the community’s reaction to this influx of new people and the conflicting emotions that their arrival engenders.Martinů (pictured left in his American exile in 1943, a a decade and a half before he Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Described as a "performer-led re-devising’"of Mozart’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni - a tale of an arrogant and ruthless lothario who seduced countess women - Don Jo certainly played around with many of the norms we encounter in both sexual relationships and in the operatic genre. Presented by Arcola Participation’s Queer Collective - a performance collective for LGBTQI+ people run as a strand of Arcola’s youth and community work - Don Jo aims to give a voice to those whose stories are often underrepresented on the stage.The piece illuminates many pertinent issues. Consent, power dynamics, Read more ...