Opera
David Nice
Louise Alder, lyric soprano of the moment and vivacity incarnate, had yet to be born when John Eliot Gardiner made his first recording of Handel's Semele with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in 1981. Now they all come together to prove that when it hits the music-theatre heights in Act 3, the first great English-language opera in all but name, premiered 275 years ago, could have been written yesterday. "Sexy," as the advance publicity claimed, it is not, but there's plenty of sensuous music as mortal Semele basks in Jupiter's love, and intense drama as she goes too far in Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North created something approaching a new art form when they performed Wagner’s Ring in "concert stagings", putting their large orchestra in full view, with singers symbolically dressed and given limited front-of-stage space, and a continuous projected screen backdrop. That approach was also used for their Turandot two years ago, and now method and team are reunited as Sir Richard Armstrong conducts Aida with Annabel Arden as director and design by Joanna Parker.The positives are considerable. Gone are conventional stage effects; instead, the performance is aurally stunning, with a Read more ...
Annabel Arden
This will be the latest in Opera North’s acclaimed concert stagings of large-scale works, which have previously included Wagner’s Ring cycle, Puccini’s Turandot and Strauss’s Salome. For Verdi’s Egyptian epic, we’ve recreated the team which brought Turandot to the concert stage, including myself as director, Sir Richard Armstrong as conductor, and designer Joanna Parker, who will be looking after all the visual aspects.I find it exciting to treat iconic works like this because the performances offer a new way to experience classic opera. When you get rid of the proscenium arch, you feel very Read more ...
David Nice
On one level, it's about Biblically informed good and evil at sea, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. On another, the love that dared not speak its name when Britten and E M Forster adapted Hermann Melville's novella is either repressed or (putatively) liberated. The conflicts can make for lacerating music theatre, as they did in Orpha Phelan's production for Opera North. Deborah Warner's ideas are there, but yet confused, to the Royal Opera House audience at least, even after runs in Madrid and Rome. In the bows of the ship, Ivor Bolton's conducting is mostly solid, no more, Read more ...
David Nice
While Bach's and Handel's Passions have been driving thousands to contemplate suffering, mortality and grace, this elegy for black lives lost over a century ago also chimes movingly with pre-Easter offerings. First seen in Southampton last year as a commission by 14-18-NOW marking the centenary of the First World War, it relives through song, dance and word the fate of the 618 men of the South African Native Labour Corps who drowned in the English channel when their ship, the SS Mendi, collided with a much larger vessel in thick fog.The very fact that few of us will not even have heard the Read more ...
David Nice
Goethe's cosmic Faust becomes Gounod's operatic fust in what, somewhat surprisingly, remains a repertoire staple. You go for the tunes, hoping for the world-class voices to do them justice and prepared for a pallid quarter-of-an-hour or two. David McVicar's 15-year-old production as revived by Bruno Ravella is beginning to date, Royal Opera trad with a few scandalous add-ons and wacky choreography by Michael Keegan-Dolan. Two things are startling this time round: the conducting of Dan Ettinger, which makes the score sound much more interesting than I remember, and a phenomenon, unique to Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For the final, and only UK, date of his Vinci Arias tour, virtuoso countertenor Franco Fagioli gave an animated and arresting recital of baroque arias at Birmingham Town Hall on Sunday afternoon with the Italian period instrument group Il pomo d’oro. The programme’s premise was to shine a light not only on the music of one of today’s best-known baroque composers - Handel - but also some of his contemporaries, examining how the composers’ relationships and rivalries with one another inspired and affected each their writing. Directed from the violin by concertmaster Zefira Valova, Il Pomo Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music’s spring opera is a theatrical triumph and musically very, very good. It’s 27 years since they last presented what Vaughan Williams called his "morality" – that was a triumph too, and they made a CD of it which I still have. They may not be issuing a sound recording this time, but as an experience in the theatre, it is even more compelling.The quality of the solo performances and of the choral singing is extraordinary. The RNCM clearly has some outstanding young men studying in its vocal faculty these days, and had the opportunity to cast from strength. In Read more ...
David Nice
If you can’t put a name to any of Jack the Ripper’s victims – and spin it however you please, victims they remain – then you shouldn’t buy the publicity about this new opera "bringing dignity back" to the murdered women in question. Isn’t it time to stop feeding the troll/killer, much as Jacinda Ardern did so swiftly and movingly under different circumstances last week, and let the five eviscerated corpses return to dust in peace? Composer Iain Bell, disturbed by their fates from an early age, sincerely thought otherwise. But though he serves up some carefully-considered vocal writing at ENO Read more ...
David Nice
It might be the nature of Handel's operatic beasts, but performances tend to fall into two camps: brilliant in the fusion of drama and virtuosity, singing and playing, or boring to various degrees. If this handsome opening gambit in the 2019 London Handel Festival is a mixture of both, that may be due more to the fact that Berenice is one of the composer's more generic offerings, not in the league of Ariodante or Alcina which also premiered on the Covent Garden site two years earlier (in 1735). Young director Adele Thomas draws a winning and precise physicality from a fine cast, but like so Read more ...
Samir Savant
This is my third year as festival director of the London Handel Festival, an annual celebration of the life and work of composer George Frideric Handel, which takes place every spring in venues across the capital. Our core charitable and artistic objectives for the Festival are to explore the full repertoire of Handel, to bring the composer’s music to broader audiences and to continue his tradition of nurturing young talent. I have always known Handel’s music, having sung it since I was a boy, but it is only in recent years that I have come to discover the complex and loveable character Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A crash, a scurry, a long, lilting serenade – the overture to Rossini’s Elizabeth I sounds oddly familiar. Not to worry. English Touring Opera has anticipated our confusion. “You may recognise this overture” flash the surtitles, to a ripple of laughter, before explaining that yes: this is essentially the same piece, originally composed in 1813 for Aureliano in Palmira that ended up attached to – of all things – The Barber of Seville. Rossini obviously rated it; in fact the overture’s closing section reappears as part of the chorus that closes Act One of Elizabeth I, which is more than it does Read more ...