Opera
David Nice
Having musicalised the madness in the method of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, what would that wackiest of composers Gerald Barry turn to next? Why, dear child, what else but the method in madness of Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Except that method is mostly discarded in the shards of nonsense extracted from Carroll, and to be found only in the musical art of compression.Usually you look sceptically at a cast which includes both the Mad Hatter and Humpty Dumpty as portent of a watered-down Alice compendium. But this savage parade, given its European premiere in last night's Barbican Read more ...
David Nice
Has there ever been a more pertinent time to revive the poetic mythologies of Brecht and Weill? The writer said that the good-life-for-dollars city of Mahagonny was not exclusively an American state of mind and should be set in any country where it's performed. But the inverted morality tale of The Seven Deadly Sins explicitly references seven American cities. And with lines like (in the Auden/Kallman translation) "If you show your offence at injustice, Mr Big will show he's offended", it's very much of the moment. Add a performer of colossal magnetism like Storm Large, the slickest Weillian Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Most singers give recitals, and very nice they are too. But there are some – Bartoli, Florez, Netrebko, Terfel – who really put on a show. Mezzo Joyce DiDonato might just be the queen of this select band, and between the projections, smoke, sound effects, costume changes, lighting design and a solo dancer, her latest project throws down the gauntlet to any singer who thinks it’s enough just to learn the music and turn up in a clean frock.In War and Peace is a classical concept-album. Faced with a world of ever-escalating conflict and chaos, DiDonato turns to music, both to explain man’s Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Jonathan Kent’s Manon Lescaut is back for a first revival at Covent Garden. It’s a gaudy affair, and seems calculated to provoke. But there are some interesting ideas here, and the musical standards remain high, even from the lesser-known names of this second-run cast.Kent has taken on the laudable task of updating the opera, moving the action away from its 18th century setting to find contemporary resonances. But there are big problems: no one sends their daughters to convents any more, and all the elopements and sexual proclivities, while they might raise eyebrows today, wouldn’t shock in Read more ...
David Nice
It should have been unmodified rapture: a gathering of English National Opera team members old and new celebrating the doyen of the company's best-selling productions. And, as has always happened with the artistic side of the company, this loving homage to Sir Jonathan Miller sounds like a triumph. Critics weren't invited to the gala - statement, not sour grapes; this was a charity event, after all - and the final rehearsal was closed, though not apparently at the wish of anyone performing. The circumstances, though, tell us a lot about a company divided.Now, perhaps, is not the time for well Read more ...
Helen Wallace
“Not as a pleasurable play, but…an urgent message…” So composer Karl Amadeus Hartmann described his caustic chamber opera Simplicius Simplicissimus, receiving its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells 81 years late. Five years before Brecht used the Thirty Years War for Mother Courage, Hartmann found in its orgy of brutality a resonance with the rise of National Socialism. His libretto sets part of Grimmelshausen’s 17th-century picaresque tale of a holy fool whose innocence protects him in a world of mercenary violence. Polly Graham’s explosively physical production for Independent Opera harnesses Read more ...
David Nice
What's a world-renowned mezzo-soprano in her middle years to do? Slimline of voice, tall and handsome in person with piercing and slightly intimidating blue eyes, Stockholm-born Anne Sofie von Otter isn't likely to sing what is known in the operatic world as "all those old bag parts", though she's a good enough actress to have carried off a few.Yet this is one of the widest-ranging and most recorded voices of the past 25 years (over 100 CDs to date). From Mozart's Idamante and Sesto in ground-breaking 1990 concert performances to a grande dame in meltdown as part of Thomas Adès's superb Read more ...
David Nice
After a day of sheer pain, would it be endless night or cathartic relief at ENO? Both, must be the answer, and much more, all at once. Iconoclastic Frank Wedekind's "earth-spirit" Lulu, exploited as a street-child but now able to turn the tables for a while on male bourgeois weakness, lives through one horrible situation after another before dying at the hands of Jack the Ripper, but Alban Berg's never merely atonal score gives such transcendent warmth to the spell she casts just by being.Has it ever sounded more grounded in its beauty, or more closely connected with the stage shenanigans, Read more ...
David Nice
Human sacrifice and long-term reconciliation are serious matters for music-drama. Not that you'd know it from Handel's pasticcio or confectionary of previous operatic hits, nor from Gerard Jones's one-note production. For strip-cartoon violence Tarantino-style you need panache, and there’s little of that here. Interesting, too, that Handel gets hardly a look-in throughout the interview Jones the Younger gives in the programme. More important, does he serve the fledgling dramatic abilities of fellow trainees on the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme? No, but these already Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Tales of Hoffmann is a young man’s piece, full of melodic energy and helter-skelter narrative thrust. We tumble from love affair to love affair, lusting, losing and leaving three women in barely three hours, before taking peevish refuge in the comforts of art. John Schlesinger’s 1980 production may have its visual compensations, but lively it ain’t (barely alive at all, at times), and now on its eighth revival is looking decidedly arthritic. Thanks to tenor Vittorio Grigolo, however, it’s sounding pretty damn fine.There’s good and bad here, but the good is overwhelmingly about Grigolo. We Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Given the horrors lurking in the composer’s more familiar operas, the warning that Maria de Rudenz is “perhaps the darkest of Donizetti’s tragedies” carries no little weight. A Gothic spectacular with echoes of The Castle of Otranto and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Maria’s dramatic excess is tempered by a fine score, full of atmospheric chorus writing and some particularly lovely arias for baritone. Staged by the same team that delivered the ghostly fantasy of a Guglielmo Ratcliff at last year’s festival, the opera is a stylish Halloween hit, welcome as trick or treat candy, but dissolving just Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Handel’s Alcina is about sex, certainly. But unlike Olivia Fuchs’s new production for the Royal Academy of Music, it’s about an awful lot of other things as well. Power, illusion, ageing, love, gender, family, intimacy – all these themes find themselves transformed on Alcina’s magical island, reworked by the end into ideas that are altogether darker and more complicated. But there’s nothing complicated about this vision. Stylish and conceptually clever, it’s a production that literally strips down to its skimpies in the first five minutes and grinds its interesting bits in your face, leaving Read more ...