Opera
Robert Beale
Alzira is Verdi’s shortest opera and his least performed, and you have to ask why. Buxton International Festival has done his legacy a service by bringing it to the stage this year, and it completes the trilogy of early Verdi operas performed there in recent years under Elijah Moshinsky’s direction. Moshinsky sees its relevance to liberation struggles in the present day, with the Incas’ battles against the Spaniards re-presented as Latin American guerillas’ struggles against oppressive government now, or not so long ago.In Giovanna D’Arco in 2015, and last year Macbetto (the original 1847 Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The audience at the Buxton International Festival has a way of cutting to the essence of a production. “They’ll have a job getting all that cutlery out of the sand” commented one of my neighbours after the end of Act One, where in Stephen Medcalf’s staging, Idomeneo (Paul Nilon) has just gone full operatic Mad Scene: hurling chairs, and sweeping an entire dinner service into the piles of sand that comprise much of the set. We’ll come back to the sand later. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that at the opera’s climactic scene, as Idomeneo prepares to sacrifice his son Idamante ( Read more ...
David Nice
Pierre Boulez simply crystallised the obvious when he described Debussy's unique masterpiece as "theatre of cruelty," despite its enigmatic beginnings. Richard Jones, when I asked him to talk about its plot, declared "it's about two men who love the same woman, with disastrous results". Productions by Jones, Peter Stein with Boulez conducting and Vick at Glyndebourne have all had us shaking with fear and weeping with pity. By going much further in symbolic abstraction than even the playwright of Pelléas et Mélisande, Maurice Maeterlinck, could have imagined, Stefan Herheim serves up a frigid Read more ...
David Nice
Opera and music theatre have set the birds shrilling in Regent's Park before in the shape of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess – a very forgettable production – and Sondheim's Into the Woods – much better, and a score which can give any 20th century opera a run for its money in terms of thematic interconnection. Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been the obvious candidate; its earlier, tauter, smaller-scale companion-piece in terms of a very English haunting, The Turn of the Screw, was the more problematic choice for the Open Air Theatre's first collaboration with English National Opera Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Rejected by London’s Royal Academy of Music in 1726 on grounds of frivolity, Partenope is the ultimate Handelian rom-com – a comedy whose intriguing is carried out with a smile, a swagger and a sparkle in the eye. But what raised eyebrows in the 18th century – unusually short arias, plenty of pacy recitative and an exuberant buffo spirit that constantly leaps out from behind the elegant classical pillars of opera seria – raises hopes and glasses in the 21st. Light on its dramatic feet, with a deliciously assured heroine at its centre, the work is the perfect stuff of summer opera.And if there Read more ...
stephen.walsh
One wearies of quarrelling with opera directors’ concepts. But what’s the alternative? To ignore or acquiesce in crude, approximate reimaginings that, like Daisy Evans's new La Traviata at Longborough, stuff a work any old how into some snappy, after-dinner parody that says nothing useful about the piece, vulgarises the situations and confuses or misrepresents the text. Evans’s Violetta is the star of a film about Marie Antoinette. Marie who? Not Duplessis, evidently, Dumas’s own lady of the camellias. A hint at the eighteenth-century costuming of the original 1853 production? Hardly: Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Just as the Last Night of the Proms is an end-of-term party with a concert tacked on, The Grange Festival (like other similar venues) offers a massive picnic interspersed with some opera. Unlike the Proms, however, where anyone can get in wearing anything they like for just £6, the English country house opera is the preserve of the well-heeled and genteel dressed in their finery, sipping expensive drinks.But as well as being socially elite, there is also a more admirable tradition of artistic elitism at these summer festivals, where top directors and singers do often fine work for the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a truism that history is written by the victors, but nowhere in classical music is the argument made more persuasively than in the legacy and reputation of Charles Gounod. In a year in which you can hardly move for Bernstein and Debussy-related events, a year in which even Couperin and Parry are getting a good showing, as well as the too-often-neglected Lili Boulanger, the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth is passing all but uncelebrated in the UK.It’s a sign of just how far out of fashion Gounod has fallen that none of the major British houses is taking the opportunity to stage Read more ...
Robert Beale
Adam Gorb’s The Path to Heaven, with libretto by Ben Kaye, is his longest work to date (almost two hours’ running time without interval) and on a story that could hardly be more tragic – the Holocaust. Its premiere at the Royal Northern College of Music was conducted by Mark Heron and given by members of Psappha with singers and musicians from the RNCM, directed by Stefan Janski.This was the culmination of a two-day festival of the music of Anthony Gilbert and Adam Gorb (pictured below), the first and present Heads of Composition of the RNCM respectively. It’s really a kind of opera Read more ...
David Nice
First palpable hit of the evening: a full orchestra in the pit under hyper-alert Opera North stalwart James Holmes, saxophones deliciously rampant. Second hit: they've got the miking of the voices right (very rare in West End shows). Third: the first ensemble number, "Another opening, another show", sends spirits soaring. What follows is very good, sometimes excellent, occasionally fresh and startling.Any sense of slight anticlimax may well the fault of a musical which, while stocked higher with hit songs than most (Cole Porter at his wickedly rhyming, melodically snaking best), has always Read more ...
theartsdesk
Are you a young blogger, vlogger or writer in the field of the arts, books and culture? If so, we've a competition for you to enter.The Hospital Club’s annual h Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. For the second year running they are teaming up with theartsdesk – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to launch a hunt for young talent.This year the Special Award is for theartsdesk / h Club Young Influencer Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
All those pranks, set-ups, fake letters and disguises, they just keep coming thick and fast in Verdi’s Falstaff. The score has irresistible energy and momentum. The composer made sure in his last opera that when the fantasies, schemes and hopes of Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff are given apparent encouragement, only to be systematically unpicked and nixed, it all happens with allegro markings like vivace, brioso and brillante. And this was a musical performance led by Richard Farnes with exactly the right kind of verve about it.And yet the dreamy setting, the Wormsley estate Read more ...