Opera
alexandra.coghlan
What kind of regime, asks Gérard, talks of justice while killing poets? It’s a question the answer to which suggests itself all too swiftly this week, briefly turning a revolutionary romp of an opera into something rather more chilling. Playing things straight in his new production of Andrea Chénier (if wigs and lavender stockings, chandeliers and pastoral divertissements can be called straight), David McVicar may have missed a trick with a story that speaks with surprising clarity about the violence of political and ideological conflict. Or maybe he didn’t. This period production is the Read more ...
David Nice
It’s quite a distance from the first performance of Monteverdi’s operatic cornucopia under the Mantuan Gonzagas’ imperious eye to this democratic celebration at the Roundhouse – 408 years, to be precise. Michael Boyd’s production takes us back even further, to those ancient Greek festivals of poetry and music which inspired the intellectual Florentines to fashion the art of opera in the late 16th century.One third of the Roundhouse seating is blocked by a grand edifice with a contemporary court seated half way up, the orchestra at its base, leaving us in a near-perfect amphitheatre with the Read more ...
David Nice
When everything works – conducting, singing, production, costumes, sets, lighting, choreography where relevant – then there’s nothing like the art of opera. But how often does that happen? In my experience, very seldom, but not this year. It's been of such a vintage that I couldn’t possibly choose the best out of six fully-staged productions – three of them from our only native director of genius, Richard Jones, who as one of his favourite singers, Susan Bullock, put it to me, deserves every gong going – and one concert performance.Fortunately I didn’t need to lean too hard on my Read more ...
David Nice
Covent Garden’s masked balls circling around the New Year feature not the seasonal bourgeois Viennese couple and a bat-winged conspirator but a king, his best friend’s wife and – excessively so in this production – the grim reaper. Big voices are what’s needed if it’s Verdi rather than Johann Strauss II, and if we can’t have Jonas Kaufmann, who’s committed his energies to a lesser protagonist, Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, this coming January, then much-trumpeted Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja will have to do. Sadly conductor Daniel Oren is no substitute for Antonio Pappano, also Chénier-bound, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A Martian, a Spitfire and a flatulent penguin are the unlikely ingredients for The Way Back Home, English National Opera’s first foray into the colourful world of children’s opera. And if those don’t sound like enticement enough, be reassured, at only 45 minutes long this really is a child-friendly taster of a genre that doesn’t always get the best press when it comes to accessibility.Amahl and the Night Visitors, L'enfant et les sortilèges, Hansel and Gretel, Where the Wild Things Are: opera for children might be a niche-of-a-niche, but over the centuries it has punched above its weight. Read more ...
David Nice
Eternal love is in the air, not seasonal fluff, at the Royal Opera this December. Later in the month Verdi’s most ecstatic duet, in Un ballo in maschera, will find his Riccardo and Amelia briefly playing Tristan and Isolde, very much in the shadow of not so much the greatest as the strangest love story ever told. Director Christof Loy underlines that strangeness and Wagner’s open questions at every point, never more heart-flippingly than when a big, middle-aged man lies full out on the floor singing “Let Tristan die” and his lover, on her knees behind him, leans over and declares tenderly but Read more ...
David Nice
Not so much a national hero, more a national disgrace. That seems to be the current consensus on Peer Gynt as Norway moves forward from having canonized the wild-card wanderer of Ibsen's early epic. It’s now 200 years since Norway gained a constitution, and 114 since Peer first shone in the country's National Theatre, that elegant emblem of the Norwegian language. Where does this uniquely prosperous country stand today, spiritually speaking, and can Ibsen’s myth, creating as potent a figure as Oedipus, Hamlet, Don Juan or Faust, offer any answers?Alexander Mørk-Eidem took the question as the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
There have been legendary conductors, and then there was Herbert von Karajan. He was a colossus of post-World War Two classical music, equipped with fearsome technical mastery allied to a vaguely supernatural gift for extracting exquisite sounds from orchestras. But that wasn't all. An expert skier with a passion for high-performance cars and flying his own jet, he was as charismatic as a movie star or sporting idol.John Bridcut's superb profile surveyed the Salzburg-born Karajan as if he were Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn, considering the contradictions in his character as though studying Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In an operatic world in which the director is an increasingly despotic king, it’s good to be reminded that, sometimes, not staging an opera is the most radical reading of all. No elaborate set or concept dominated David Edwards’s one-off Pelléas et Mélisande at the Royal Festival Hall last night. There were just suggestions, allusions, echoes. And a cast – what a cast – that came close to perfection.Or course Pelléas isn’t just any old opera. Debussy’s “unusual” music-drama breaks all the rules, unfolding in a sequence of dramatic fragments, the orchestra offering the guiding string through Read more ...
David Nice
A great creative partnership like the one between composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars can endure the occasional wobble. In his peerless autobiography Hallelujah Junction Adams is frank about the information overload in Sellars’ premiere production of the millennial opera-oratorio woven around the birth of Christ, El Niño. His semi-staging of its companion piece The Gospel According to the Other Mary seen at the Barbican last year was, on the other hand, so pure, focused and perfect within Sellars’ usual semaphoring bounds, that I feared the full works might unleash excess again. Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
“Watch out for the dog!” instructs Covent Garden’s programme for its latest revival of L’elisir d’amore. These creatures do have a way of stealing shows, but the canine who dashed across the flat Italian cornfield after Dr Dulcamara’s decrepit lorry had some impressive competition – from Vittorio Grigolo’s behind.The Italian tenor de nos jours, as Nemorino letting his hair down under the influence in part two, was apparently proving himself a hotter mover than the audience had anticipated. Fortunately his singing more than matches his dance-floor expertise; by the time the opera reached "Una Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Were it not for William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, the vocal and instrumental ensemble he started in Paris in the 1970s, the beauties of the musical French Baroque might have remained a dusty fact of pre-Revolutionary history. As it is, there is barely a singer, player or conductor now performing Lully, Couperin, Rameau, Charpentier et al who has not benefited from the life’s work of this diligent conductor-musicologist. Through him, their arts are indeed flourishing.So a one-off concert at the Barbican, part of a Europe-wide tour to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Read more ...