Opera
graham.rickson
Groan-inducing rhymes are becoming a feature of Opera North’s autumn season. Like their Coronation of Poppea, this revival of The Bartered Bride has some cracking lines. Matching "swanky" with "cranky" and "lanky" is pretty neat, but hearing James Creswell’s oleaginous Kecal slip in "hanky-panky" is a masterstroke.Quite why we’ve got sporadic surtitles is a mystery; Leonard Hancock and David Pountney’s smart translation is clearly audible throughout. This company’s chorus is one of its greatest assets, and every syllable tells.First staged in 1998, Daniel Slater’s production of Smetana’s Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
It takes a brave man to programme a single performance of Berg’s Wozzeck on a damp Thursday evening in Glasgow. But Donald Runnicles is such a man. In his five years at the helm of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra he has proved adept at making the implausible possible, and turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. With the BBC in support, and its renewed commitment to recording and broadcasting from all corners of the UK, Runnicles (pictured in rehearsal below) is maybe not so much brave as canny – he has a showman’s eye for a concert programme that will challenge and entertain; Read more ...
David Nice
When I entered the light and spacious chief conductor’s room in Bamberg’s Konzerthalle, Jonathan Nott was poised with a coloured pencil over one of the toughest of 20th century scores, Varèse’s Arcana. He thought he might have bitten off rather a lot to chew the day after that night’s Bamberg programme of Jörg Widmann’s Violin Concerto, Strauss’s Eine Alpensinfonie and a new commission as part of the orchestra’s new Encore! project, David Philip Hefti’s con moto.An Amsterdam Concertgebouw special beckoned, a large-scale throwback to Nott’s days at the head of the Asko Ensemble and the Read more ...
David Nice
You may be more familiar with the Italian title, Il mondo della luna, but chances are you won’t have seen this or any of Haydn’s other 16 operas. You haven’t missed much, at least until the last of his works as court composer to the Esterházy family, Armida, an "heroic drama" rather than the slim comedies which don’t seem to have inspired the composer to the heights of his symphonies and string quartets. Glyndebourne failed to trigger a revival with La fedeltà premiata in 1979 – my first acquaintance with the house as a teenager; young Simon Rattle was conducting – and more recently the Royal Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To take Figaro – the ultimate operatic assault on class distinctions and social hierarchies – and set it on a giant revolve is a gesture as wilful as it is elegant. Not only are divisions of above and below-stairs dissolved in this steadily circling world, but also those of background and foreground, onstage and offstage. By the time the set’s rotations revealed two young valets with their trousers down, relieving themselves up against a palace wall, some few minutes into the Overture, Fiona Shaw had already won her audience and her case.When we first encountered Shaw’s production in 2011 – Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
First the good news. At 73, is Plácido Domingo anywhere near retiring? Er, no. When the question came up in an interview on Sunday (on video below), he answered : "The reason I don't retire is because I can still sing." And then with a glint in his eye: "I still feel I have to know the the right moment. Not to sing one day more.... nor one day less."And more good news: Domingo does give an affecting performance as Francesco, the aged Doge of Venice in I Due Foscari, in a rather staid and conservative globe-trotting production of Verdi's early opera, which has also also been seen in Los Read more ...
David Nice
Should you not have caught one of the 20th century’s handful of greatest Wagnerian singers live - I did, just once, in a Prom of uneven excerpts - chances are that you first heard Birgit Nilsson in Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene from Götterdämmerung on Sir Georg Solti’s Vienna Philharmonic Ring recording. The distinguished President of the Birgit Nilsson Prize who lives in the orchestra's wonderful city, physicist, economist and Nilsson’s biggest if always most respectful fan Professor Doktor Rutbert Reisch, insists that the connection was never a criterion behind the bi- or triennial prize of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
According to the programme essay, Philip Glass describes his latest opera as “serious, but also hilariously funny”. All I can say is, if The Trial is his idea of thigh-slapping hilarity then never, ever let him pick the movie on a night out. Whether the humour’s failure to translate lies with score or production is hard to tell at a premiere, but my money lies with the former.Philip Glass’s music can do many things: it can mesmerise and evolve, bully you into submission and seduce with its quietly shifting shapes, and it has a particularly nice line in ominous tension, as we saw in the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What’s the collective noun for mezzo-sopranos? A "warble"? A "might"? A "trouser"? Whatever it is, it doesn’t get a lot of usage outside a choral context. Where in opera would you ever find multiple mezzos sharing a stage? Hardly anywhere. Except, that is, in contemporary castings of baroque operas.Joyce DiDonato may have been the headliner for Handel’s Alcina at the Barbican last night, but add Alice Coote and Christine Rice to the mix – both singers more than capable of dominating a stage on their own – and you have something approaching glorious excess. Combine them all in a single trio (“ Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Usually, anyone bringing tuberculosis and transgression to the regional centres of Woking, Norwich and Milton Keynes would meet redoubtable opposition. In the case of Glyndebourne’s new touring production of La traviata, that would be a shame, because this is a lean, powerful version that reaches straight for the heart and gives it a good squeeze. In Russian soprano Irina Dubrovskaya and American tenor Zach Borichevsky, Glyndebourne has found very convincing replacements for the acclaimed Festival performers Venera Gimadieva and Michael Fabiano, who enact director Tom Cairns’ vision of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tim Albery’s production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea takes plenty of liberties. There are moments when you scratch your head, quietly sigh, and think about your interval drink, or what you’ll eat when you get home.The cuts may disorientate Monteverdi affecionados. There’s also a bit of reordering, and no proper coronation. Albery’s new translation contains some excruciating couplets: Poppea is rhymed with "betray her" at one point, and later on there’s the pairing of strumpet and crumpet. Cupid is matched with stupid. Niggles aside, this is a wonderfully fresh, accessible staging Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea is an opera with a one-track mind. The music throbs and pulses with dancing desire, suspensions and elaborate embellishments defer gratification, while recitative is poised constantly on the edge of melodic climax. Desire is everywhere, from the innocent flirtations of a young courtier and his lady, to the hopeless love of Ottone and of course the knowing, mature passions of the Emperor Nerone and his mistress Poppea. Without it, there’s a void at the core of the opera – a void no amount of fine singing or playing can fill.And try the Academy of Ancient Read more ...