Opera
stephen.walsh
Why is Un Ballo in maschera not as popular as the trio of Verdi masterpieces – Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore – that, with a couple of digressions, preceded it in the early 1850s? Its music is scarcely less brilliant than theirs, and if its plot is on a par of absurdity with Trovatore’s, it is at least, on the whole, more fun. One problem might be a certain thinness in the portraiture, as if Verdi was more interested in the incidents than in his characters. In his new production for WNO, David Pountney seems to interpret this as a sort of meta-theatricality, an opera watching itself being Read more ...
Robert Beale
Berlioz called it a "concert opera". His telling of the Faust story is in scenes and highly theatrical, but a bit of a challenge to put on in the theatre, with its marching armies, floating sylphs, dancing will-o’-the-wisps and galloping horses. It seems he expected it to be a kind of giant cantata, and that’s the way the Hallé and Sir Mark Elder perform it. But it’s still operatic in concept, and that very theatricality demands much of its chorus as well as its soloists – the assembled choir has to represent "peasants, penitents, drinkers, gnomes, sylphs, soldiers, students, will-o’-the- Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The flayed corpse of a dead seal hangs red and grotesque at the back of the stage. It’s a placeholder; we know that by the end of Anthropocene – Scottish composer Stuart McRae’s latest collaboration with librettist Louise Welsh – something more familiar, and far more horrifying, will take its place.It’s the same trick we hear in McRae’s skilfully crafted score, which opens in teeming musical activity. The orchestra scuttles and ticks with nervous animation. But while the sense is of motion, the harmony remains resolutely rooted, unmoving – a musical block of ice trapping life, confrontation Read more ...
David Nice
Backstories, we're told, are a crucial part of stage visionary Richard Jones's rehearsal process. Janáček, or rather Russian playwright Ostrovsky on whose The Storm the composer based Katya Kabanova, gives several of his hemmed-in characters narratives to suggest what they were and why they are where they are now (not good), stuck in a deadly dull – or just plain deadly – provincial town. It's a tribute to Jones's outwardly spare production that we want to know more.Is the mental health of Katya now, married to a drinker and bullied by her stepmother, the result of persecution by this Borough Read more ...
Robert Beale
A sad tale’s best for winter, and Opera North have returned to Janáček’s lyrical taken on a classic Russian drama of domestic abuse, guilt and suicide for this ingredient of their current season. Director Tim Albery and designer Hildegard Bechtler created their production 12 years ago, revisiting their partnership on the same opera for the company eight years before that. It seems to cheer up a little each time… but only a little.In 1999 the whole thing was virtually set-less and the costumes universally drab-grey, the better to emphasise the stifling and loveless respectability against which Read more ...
David Nice
Harpers on the undeniably offensive aspect of Wagner the man might question attending a concert performance of his second Ring opera on World Holocaust Day. Fortunately there's nothing anti-semitic to be found anywhere in Die Walküre. As embodied by the cruel and tender score, the poet-composer's transformation of barbaric Northern mythology into the most essential of themes for our or any time - the power of love versus the love of power (not my coinage, but says it all) - is pure compassionate genius. It's crystallised in an interpretation as phenomenal as that of Vladimir Jurowski - too Read more ...
Robert Howarth
I’m here in Leeds at the end of five weeks of quite intense rehearsals for Opera North's new production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. Our director James Brining and his amazing team (including assistant director Deborah Cohen, set and costume designer Colin Richmond, and choreographer Tim Claydon) are putting it on the stage, and I’m ably assisted by George Jackson and Philip Voldman. Together we’re all unpicking and stitching the piece back together.What’s fascinating to me is that James and I are coming at this piece from quite different perspectives. He has worked with Opera North Read more ...
David Nice
Prince Yeletsky, one of the shortest roles for a principal baritone in opera but with the loveliest of arias, looms large in Stefan Herheim's concept of The Queen of Spades. Not so much as a name in Pushkin's perfect short story of 1834, a mere lyric foil in Tchaikovsky's music-drama, Yeletsky here becomes the composer himself, onstage for nearly all the action - the homosexual who married to stifle rumours, the artist acclaimed by all Russia who may or may not have deliberately diced with cholera to occasion his untimely death: the King of Tragedy. So what about the Queen of Spades? Her Read more ...
David Nice
Outnumbered by four to one: out of the classical/opera team, Alexandra Coghlan, Jessica Duchen, David Benedict and Boyd Tonkin all chose English National Opera's production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess as their best of the operatic year, while I went on another night when the spirit from usually zesty conductor John Wilson and a fine cast seems to have been shining less bright. Most disappointing, I thought, was the cliched staging and the way that director James Robinson had failed to encourage even a singer as consummate on stage as Nicole Cabell to find a convincing body language. But I Read more ...
David Nice
Once upon a time there was the terrible mouth of Richard Jones's Welsh National Opera/Met Hänsel und Gretel, finding an idiosyncratic equivalent to the original Engelbert Humperdinck's dark Wagnerian heart. Then came something very nasty in the witch's deep freeze of the last Royal Opera staging, something of a dog's dinner from Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser. It seems that The House got cold feet about the cold store after tabloid uproar - though not so much as to stop a revival - and the result now is a much cleaner but not much more flavoursome fantasy by director-designer Antony Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music’s December opera production was the useful double bill of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi from Puccini’s Trittico. I say useful, because the former employs a women’s chorus (and, briefly, a full one) plus 16 named roles, and the latter a cast of 16 – an opportunity for a big opera department to put plenty of its singers on the stage: it’s one they’ve taken before.This time there was the difference that the eponymous characters were sung by RNCM artists in residence Linda Richardson and Quentin Hayes – a first, as far as I’m aware, and one that gave poise Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
When the biggest laugh in Bernstein’s Candide goes to a narrator’s mention of how nationalism was sweeping through Europe, you may have a problem. Still, the Bernstein Centenary has been among the best of all possible anniversary celebrations this year and at the LSO Candide - the great man’s bonkers operetta-ish take on Voltaire, a flawed masterpiece with a succession of glorious tunes and snappy lyrics - could have been its apex. At times, it was.If it wasn’t wholly up there, that is in large part due to the conundrum the piece poses about how to bring it convincingly to the stage (or here Read more ...