Opera
David Nice
A political prisoner is brutally initiated into the life of a state penitentiary, and leaves it little over 90 minutes later. Four inmates reveal their brutal past histories with elliptical strangeness - each would need an episode of something like Orange is the New Black - and two plays staged during a holiday for the convicts take up about a quarter of the action. I won't say that director Krzysztof Warlikowski makes complete sense of Janáček's maverick take on Dostoyevsky's semi-fictionalised prison memoir - occasionally he even rather overloads it - but everything on stage has a feverish Read more ...
David Benedict
“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” Hang on a minute, Tytania, there are no flowers. Instead, as Britten’s ominously low strings slither and tremble up and down the scale, the curtain rises on a huge, near-acidic emerald green hilly slope lying against a seemingly fathomless International Klein Blue cyclorama broken only by a glowing crescent moon. Except it’s not just a hill: it’s also a giant bed; the perfect bed, in fact, in which to spend one wonderful midsummer’s night. This physical metaphor is both central to and typical of director Robert Carsen and designer Michael Levine’s Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
One question dominates any staging of Dialogues des Carmélites. How will the production team deal with the cruelty and tragedy in the 12th and last scene when all of the nuns, one by one, go through with their vow of martyrdom and calmly proceed to the guillotine, singing the Salve Regina? No spoilers here, but this new production at Guildhall School (a very different one from that staged in 2011) sticks to a tone which is calm, and humane. For that considered sense of unity, this is a production well worth seeing.Scenographer takis, director Martin Lloyd-Evans, and lighting designer Robbie Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Don’t you just love that new concert hall smell? The main hall at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire is so new that as soon as you walk in you get the scent of fresh woodwork; so new, in fact, that it won’t even be officially opened until next month (Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the Earl of Wessex are doing the honours, apparently). And it’s a beauty: a spacious, shoebox-shaped room with a stage big enough for a Mahler symphony and acoustics that are lucid (without being flashy) in all registers. You can sort of understand why the RBC succumbed to the temptation to smash a bottle of musical Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You have to wonder why it has taken this long. Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking premiered in San Francisco back in 2000 and has since been performed over 300 times across the world, staged everywhere from Cape Town to Copenhagen. Only now, 18 years on, has this contemporary classic finally received its UK premiere at the Barbican in a one-night-only, semi-staged, concert-hall version of Leonard Foglia’s production originally created for Chicago, and most recently seen in full force in Madrid. Eighteen years.In the time it has taken Dead Man Walking to almost reach us in London, we’ve had two Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Inspired by the astonishing true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years, Jonathan Dove’s Flight is a humorous, touching, uplifting yet profoundly poignant study into human relationships, interactions and emotions. This is opera buffa for the modern age – relevant, relatable, lighthearted and often downright silly, but still revealing some very pertinent truths. Stephen Barlow’s slick production, first seen in an outdoor setting at Opera Holland Park in 2015, is transported to Glasgow's Theatre Royal by Scottish Opera, its single Read more ...
David Nice
Very well, so ENO's latest Gilbert and Sullivan spectacular was originally to have been The Gondoliers directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. But that Venetian fantasia has already been seen at the Coliseum in recent years, and Iolanthe - which I can't remember experiencing live with a full orchestra since the declining years of the D'Oyly Carte - ranges wider. Sullivan’s spoof of supernatural Mendelssohn/Weber, as dewily beautiful as its sources, meets Gilbert at his multiple-rhyming sharpest in the mésalliance (that word is French) between fairy ladies and Read more ...
graham.rickson
You’d expect a degree of mischief and bafflement in an opera about mistaken identity, closing with a scene set at a masked ball. But Tim Albery’s new Opera North Un ballo in maschera is confusing for the wrong reasons, its shortcomings all the more irritating compared how good the performance actually sounds. Verdi was forced by censors to relocate his 18th century Swedish shenanigans to Boston, his real life protagonists recast as nonsensical fakes (King Gustav becoming "Riccardo, Earl of Warwick"). Albery sensibly returns us to Northern Europe, the sets and costumes suggesting that we’re in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Opera-lovers: if you’ve finally had enough of the wheelchairs and syringes, the fifties skirts and heels, the mobile phones and the white box sets, and the rest of the symbolic paraphernalia of the right-on modern opera production, pop along to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and catch up with Michael Blakemore’s quarter-century old staging of Puccini’s great warhorse. Blakemore’s Tosca (with designer Ashley Martin-Davis) ticks every box on the traditionalist’s questionnaire, from the plausible (if not accurate) Sant’ Andrea della Valle of Act 1 to the only slightly rearranged Castello Read more ...
David Nice
Roll up, dépêchez-vous, for Carmen the - what? Circus? Vaudeville/music-hall/cabaret? Opéra-ballet, post-Rameau? Not, certainly, a show subject to the kind of updated realism which has been applied by just about every production other than the previous two at Covent Garden. Barrie Kosky dares to tread, and high-kick, where no one has gone before, giving us insights into the nature of Bizet's hybrid, with a few jolts in the score, too. But a staging needs to be authentic in every moment, like the composer, and while some of the cavalcade is brilliant in the extreme, what should be moments of Read more ...
stephen.walsh
David Pountney’s tenure at WNO has been an almost unqualified success, despite some eccentricities of repertoire and a certain obstinacy in the matter of new commissions. His own productions have included at least three of unforgettable quality. He has vigorously promoted money-saving co-productions like this one with Theater Bonn. But there is not much, for my money, that even he can do with La forza del destino, Verdi’s ramshackle response to an early 1860s commission from the Imperial Theatres in St. Petersburg.Did Verdi have in mind some vague idea of what would go down well in barbaric Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The advertising for La Nuova Musica’s Orlando billed it as “Handel’s most psychologically complex opera”. Whether or not you agree (and there are plenty of heavyweight rivals – Alcina, Giulio Cesare and Agrippina just for starters) there’s also the issue that it’s only half the story. Orlando may be a complicated portrait of mental instability and madness, but it’s also a magical pastoral comedy peopled with lovelorn shepherdesses and wizards, featuring quite the silliest ending of all Handel (although this too, admittedly, is a much-contested category). This performance did little to Read more ...