Opera
David Nice
It was excellent, flesh-creepy fun back in 1978, when a young Simon Rattle conducted the Liverpool world premiere with the composer declaiming, but how well has Austrian maverick H(einz) K(arl) "Nali" Gruber's "pandemonium" for chansonnier and orchestra Frankenstein!! stood the test of time? One word: brilliantly. In the hands of the master, who not only conducted its bewitching chamber version but also kazooed, crooned, falsettoed and shouted his way through his absurdist fellow Vienneser H.C. Artmann's contemporary children's rhymes, its performance as a centrepiece of the Royal Stockholm Read more ...
David Nice
Even seemingly immortal singers grow old. Sir Bryn is closer to the "Martinmas summer" of Shakespeare's and Verdi's Sir John than when first he put on the fat suit at the Royal Opera 18 years ago. Even if he walks the gouty walk that matches the belly, vocally he seems richer than ever. Maybe not quite the definitive operatic Falstaff of our era - that honour falls to Ambrogio Maestri - but a suitable planet for the variable young moons of Liverpool's European Opera Centre to revolve around, at least two of them shining bright. With the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra very much present Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Go west, opera-lover: Mid Wales Opera is back in business. In fact, it’s been back since spring this year, when it toured venues in Wales and England with a warmly reviewed Handel Semele and a striking (and impressively cast) Magic Flute inspired by 1970s British sci-fi. That was the first production under the company’s new artistic leadership of Jonathan Lyness and Richard Studer – a conductor/director team with considerable form and substantial ambitions. This spirited chamber staging of Walton’s 1967 “extravaganza in one act” The Bear – MWO’s third new production this year – is modest in Read more ...
David Nice
A certain online scandalmonger and coffin-chaser likes to preface news of deaths in the musical world with "sadness" or "tragedy", usually when neither he nor we have heard of the person in question. But the end of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's two-and-a-half-year struggle with brain cancer really does make opera-lovers very sad indeed – not just because he was only 55, but also because one of the world's most beautiful lyric baritone voices still had much more to give. As with most great artists, though, he has left us a legacy on film and CD which guarantees him a certain immortality.Soul and Read more ...
David Nice
If you're not going to mention the imaginative genius of Stravinsky, Auden and Kallman within the covers of your programme, and the only article, by the director, is titled "Acting Naturally", then the production had better deliver. That remarkable actor Selina Cadell's eloquent words, both there and in a "First Person" piece on theartsdesk, promise more than actually emerges in a debut staging from the lavishly-supported OperaGlass Works which doesn't even have the curiosity value of going daringly wrong. Between them Cadell and her curiously un-buoyant conductor, Laurence Cummings, much Read more ...
william.ward
It has long been a mystery why no new production of Semiramide should have been staged at Covent Garden since 1887: un offesa terribile considering that this splendid melodramma tragico should have been the inaugural production of the Royal Italian Opera House (our current theatre’s predecessor) in 1847.In fact much of Rossini’s repertoire, both comic and tragic, fell out of favour worldwide from about the time of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, partly as a disappearance of such star lead sopranos such as Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba. So with the exception of a couple of propaganda-driven Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The great and good of the London music scene were gathered at English National Opera last night for the unveiling of American Wunderkind Nico Muhly’s new opera, Marnie. Although it was commissioned by the Met in New York, somehow ENO managed to wangle the world premiere, which has been widely hyped and was ecstatically received by a packed house. But for all that there was much to enjoy, it hardly deserved such rapture, and there were problems with both piece and production.Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the Winston Graham novel of 1961. The opera looks Read more ...
Selina Cadell
"Vary the song, O London, change!" sings Tom Rakewell as he tires of the great metropolis. WH Auden and Chester Kallman's libretto for Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress strikes a chord with me too. London has magnificent opera but, at the top end, it comes at a price. Not just for the audience but for the singers. Lavish sets and costumes force historical productions into revivals. Singers fly in, rehearse for a few days, and slot themselves into the existing blueprint. Mood over content can prevail.There is a case now for change.With the current trend for broadcasting productions in cinemas ( Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Katie Mitchell’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor opened at Covent Garden in 2016 and now returns for a first revival. Royal Opera were clearly expecting great things, even from the start, and this is the third cast to have presented the show, after two separately cast runs last year, and a commercial DVD is also available. Mitchell has repaid their confidence with an impressively conceived production: visually arresting, suitably dramatic and with many subtle narrative additions. Add to all that an impressive revival cast and excellent conducting, and the production’s fortunes seem secure. Read more ...
David Nice
Fancy that: the day after the last major Menotti staging I can remember in the UK, The Medium at the Edinburgh Festival, "splendid piece of post-Puccinian grand guignol" turned up in two different reviews (moral: don't discuss the performance with your colleagues). "Dated piece of post-Puccinian absurdist melodrama" might be a bit harsh but not so wide of the mark in the case of The Consul, his late 1940s fantasy rooted in the horrors of totalitarianism and western bureaucracy. Certainly the Guildhall School students, conductor and production team gave it the best possible chance, making it Read more ...
David Nice
Singing students from the Guildhall School should have been issued with a three-line whip to fill the inexplicably half-empty Milton Court concert hall for last night's charmer. After all, every musician, and not just sopranos, should know that this is how it ought to be done. True, an effervescent personality like Lucy Crowe's can't be simulated. But every other respect of her stunningly sung and varied Mozart can be aspired to: the relaxed, natural stance (and in this instance, knowing how to play a recalcitrant shoe heel for comedy), knowing what to do with the hands, how to execute Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Beautiful though Katie Mitchell’s original production of Written on Skin is, George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s opera has always felt more at home in the concert hall. Last year’s Barbican performance put Benjamin’s meticulous orchestral writing absolutely in the spotlight, but perhaps this “concert-staging” – fully directed, but minimally staged – offers the best solution yet, allowing orchestra and action to share focus in this gripping piece of musical storytelling.Because that’s the power of this rarest of things, a contemporary opera that has already found a firm foothold in the Read more ...