Opera
David Nice
So here’s where I join the ranks of Old Opera Bores by declaring this Salome, Nina Stemme, the best I’ve seen since Hildegard Behrens in 1978, and this Salome as in Richard Strauss’s Wilde opera from Donald Runnicles and his Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble categorically the most near-perfect. It’s also the first time I’ve had a group of very loud, rude people behind me shouting “sit down” when I stood at the end (and John the Baptist’s God knows I don’t do that often). To which the only answers were “stand up yourselves” and “what does it take?” Most of the arena stalls eventually followed suit Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
The Edinburgh Festival reserved its biggest operatic event for last. From St Petersburg, the Mariinsky Opera brought a production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens that could truly be described as epic: a stellar cast, a vast trompe d’oeil set, and an overall duration comfortably over five hours. A large audience greeted it enthusiastically, but not ecstatically. Maybe exhaustion had set in: there were yawns and smiles in equal measure on the way out.Les Troyens is really two operas. In the first two acts Troy falls to the Greeks after the naïve defenders ignore the prophecies of doom from Cassandra Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
First, confessions. I’m the dance critic here at theartsdesk. Yes, this is a review of a concert performance of an opera, and no, I haven’t picked up a detailed knowledge of Rossini’s oeuvre as a byproduct of my education in pirouettes and Pina Bausch. I attended last night’s concert as a common or garden punter, and a chance one at that, taking a ticket to save wasting it after its original owner had to give it up because of a work commitment.Alexandra wrote a piece the other week about what opera has to offer the under-30s. Though I’m far from an opera novice, I am in that demographic and I Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
God it’s good to laugh in an opera house. Not a hear-how-clever-I-am-to-get-the-laborious-operatic-joke laugh, or an I-realise-this-is-supposed-to-be-funny-so-I’m-playing-along one, but a real, spontaneous laugh that tickles into sound before you’ve even had time to register its approach. Back for its second appearance, Robert Carsen’s Glyndebourne Rinaldo is ingenious and witty, joyous and completely over-the-top, and the best possible ending to this year’s summer opera season.Back in 2011 the show was great, but still felt like a work-in-progress. Three years on, and Rinaldo is back and Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you only ever listened to opera from recordings, you might overlook the fact that it's as much theatre as it is music. In the opera house on the night, it's all well and good for the orchestra to play the score and the singers to sing their parts, but on top of that you have to allow for costume changes, move the scenery, adjust the lighting and make sure you get all the right people on and off stage at the appropriate moments. It's what makes opera the living, breathing, sometimes splendidly chaotic spectacle it is.It was a strange sensation, then, to spend some time in the orchestra pit Read more ...
edward.seckerson
All kinds of narratives were at play in this Prom from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Sakari Oramo - and perhaps the truly adventurous programmer might have double-deployed Rory Kinnear, dispassionately chronicling Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, and taken us beyond the Overture and into the melodramas of Beethoven’s Incidental Music to Egmont. Mind you, that overture will more than suffice as a self-contained drama when it is as boldly drawn as it was here with a daring expansiveness in the lowering F minor Introduction and equally impulsive and defiant allegro with John Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s raining. Not spitting or drizzling, properly raining, with clouds so thick that you know they’re here to stay. Yet rather than take shelter in restaurants and bars, or simply stay at home on this soggy summer night, 7,000 people in a stylish array of plastic macs and souwesters have made their way to the harbourside of the small Austrian town of Bregenz. Why? An annual festival that takes opera to extremes.We’ve had opera in bunkers and canal barges, beaches and helicopters, pubs and warehouses, so what’s so special about opera on a lake? For one thing, Bregenz isn’t about opera close to Read more ...
David Nice
“What does opera have to say to the under-30s?” asked Alexandra Coghlan on theartsdesk yesterday. The question “what does opera have to say to the under-10s?” has had to wait until today. For although yesterday afternoon’s performance of Will Todd’s newish opera for children of all ages was the last in its second, sell-out run on the Yucca Lawn behind Holland Park House, it seemed essential to make my four-year-old goddaughter Mirabel available for comment, and that was the only date available in her diary. The answer? Another wildly enthusiastic “plenty”, from her, mother, aunt and me. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
If, like me, your first reaction to the question “What does opera have to say to under-30s” is “What doesn’t opera have to say to them, or anyone, for that matter?” then you can stop reading now. Job done. Go out and spread the word. For everyone else – and that includes Tolstoy, Rousseau and Samuel Johnson, famous opera-detractors all – I have just one further question: what is your problem with opera?There’s a myth that’s passed around by arts administrators and organisations around the world that audiences for opera are, and will always be, old. Don’t worry if the audience is looking a Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
If last year’s Ring cycle triumphantly proved that world-class opera can be done at the Albert Hall, this Rosenkavalier suggests that the less epic end of the repertoire isn’t such a sure thing. That is not to say that this performance was dud, far from it; rather that its few problems were venue related. Balance was the main issue, though Robin Ticciati did a great job of whipping the London Philharmonic Orchestra into a passionate frenzy in the Prelude and then taking things down a notch and keeping them there to avoid engulfing the voices. The audience will have had a different experience Read more ...
David Nice
Some of us have witnessed Traviatas where single stars were born: Angela Gheorghiu for Solti at the Royal Opera nearly 20 years ago springs quickest to mind. Some would claim a dream couple in Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon on peak form at Salzburg. Yet how often in a lifetime do you catch an evening like this, where all three principals are not only up to the very highest vocal standards but also work as one with the conductor to make sense of every phrase, every word, in an intimate space for which Verdi's chamber opera might have been crafted?Mark Elder, conducting a London Read more ...
David Nice
You can usually trust the buzz around rehearsals. From Glyndebourne, five weeks into preparation for La traviata, which opens tomorrow, one of the team working on Tom Cairns’ new production declared in an e-mail conversation that newcomer soprano Venera Gimadieva was possibly the most definitive Violetta yet. And when I was havering over whether to interview American tenor Michael Fabiano, not by then having watched a wealth of stupendous videos on his website, the response was “you absolutely must”.I soon saw why Fabiano at 30 is feted in the States as one of the most exciting lirico spinto Read more ...