Opera
alexandra.coghlan
The Royal Opera House’s Maria Stuarda is the third major production of Donizetti’s historical opera in less than two years. First there was David McVicar’s kitschy-traditional production for the Met, then there was Rudolf Frey’s baffling concept-drama at Welsh National Opera, and now directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier add their voices to a conversation still trying to make sense of these passionate warring queens with their determinedly dispassionate music.The historical specificities of Donizetti’s story make it particularly resistant to directorial innovation. Whichever way you play Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Speaking from the stage before curtain-up on The Barber, Longborough’s founder and chairman, Martin Graham, stressed the hard work put in by director Richard Studer and conductor Jonathan Lyness on their two 2014 productions, this one and Tosca. He wasn’t kidding. Read the programme and you find (for both operas): director, Richard Studer; designer, Richard Studer; costume, Richard Studer. Lyness conducting both works. These are not jet-setting artists descending on Gloucestershire with their brainstorming concepts, but dedicated craftsmen doing their best for the works in hand. And it shows. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Is this sheltered place the wicked world where things unspoken of have been?” The Governess’s question echoes through the careful suggestions and delicate temporal interweavings of Annilese Miskimmon’s The Turn of the Screw, twisting smiles into sordid suggestions, schoolrooms into places not of care but corruption.It takes a bold director to look at the evocative façade of Holland House – all crenellations and architectural ghosts – and then cover it up. Henry James’s Bly couldn’t find a more natural backdrop in any theatre in London, but Miskimmon turns resolutely away from this obvious Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
The mezzo-soprano Brigitte Fassbaender, who will be 75 on Thursday 3 July, was unsurpassed for dramatic impact and presence in roles such as Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and Prince Orlofsky in Die Fledermaus, during a singing career which spanned from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s.Her command of the long lines of Mahler's songs, and the immediacy and understanding she brought to Lieder generally placed her in the very top flight of interpreters alongside Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Peter Schreier and Christa Ludwig.She stopped singing almost two decades ago, and has since forged a career as Read more ...
David Nice
There are two avenues down which to approach the well-kept flower beds of Mozart’s early operas. One is to be surprised how rarely the muse of fire which rages through Idomeneo, his first undisputed masterpiece, descends on a work composed just a few years earlier like La finta giardiniera (The Counterfeit Garden Girl), and that’s how I felt sitting through a performance of it for only the second time in my life. The other is to rejoice in the few signs of things to come, the intimations of immortality, which was clearly the thinking behind its selection by Glyndebourne’s new music director Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Mozart operas – we’ve all been there, whistled the arias, untangled the love triangles (quadrants/pentagons), dabbled in some cross-dressing, and sung a rousing chorus of general forgiveness. But for every ubiquitous Don Giovanni or Le Nozze di Figaro there are at least two or three other operas that have drifted from the repertoire, rarely performed and little known. 1784’s L’oca del Cairo, anyone?Think of as many Mozart operas as you can (and feel free to include singspiels and any other works performed on stage in the list). Fewer than 10? Keep trying. Fewer than 20? Still not quite there Read more ...
Frederic Wake-Walker
La finta giardiniera is about seven characters in search of love. They are all pretending to some extent – they are not being truthful to themselves. It’s a classic Mozartian conceit which comes back in Così fan tutte in particular but also in Le nozze di Figaro – that, in order to love someone, you need to know yourself. Finta is about these seven characters coming to some level of understanding by the end, and therefore being able to love each other.The title character, the “fake garden girl”, is called Sandrina, but that’s only a made-up name. She’s actually called Violante. Before the Read more ...
theartsdesk
We have a pair of tickets to give away to the performance on 13 July of Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s revival of Don Giovanni, directed by Jonathan Kent. All you need to do is answer the follow three questions. The answers can be found in the relevant place on theartsdesk.How many stars did our critic Ismene Brown give to this year’s revival of the production?Complete the sentence. When interviewed on theartsdesk, the director Jonathan Kent described the character Don Giovanni as “a sceptic who…”?Elliot Madore sings the title role in this revival. In which composer’s work did Read more ...
David Nice
Can it really be 12 years since Antonio Pappano inaugurated his transformative era as the Royal Opera’s Music Director conducting Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos? Christof Loy’s production seemed so radical at the time. We were put off our guard by seeing opera stars in the backstage Prologue preparing for an 18th century opera seria – to be famously interrupted by common or garden song and dance in poet-librettist Hofmannsthal's ingenious misalliance – but what we actually got in the "performance" was a modern Ariadne slumped on a dressing table in a hotel room the walls of which only suggested Read more ...
stephen.walsh
For Longborough to open their new season with Tosca after last summer’s triumphant Wagner is to invoke Joseph Kerman’s famous diatribe against Puccini’s “shabby little shocker” in his fifties book Opera as Drama. Kerman used Wagner’s theories to pick holes in Puccini’s at times flagrant theatricality: which only goes to show what an untheoretical thing opera can be. Because Tosca is a work that rarely fails in the theatre, even on so apparently unsuitable a stage as that of Longborough’s converted barn, with a cut down orchestra, a barely adequate chorus, and soloists accustomed to projecting Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Grange Park Opera has a strong penchant for French repertoire, and has been valiant, consistent and highly imaginative in presenting it ever since 1998, when Wasfi Kani and Michael Moody first started inviting opera-goers to the unique setting of a Greek revival house in the Hampshire countryside. This year's production of Massenet's 1909 Don Quichotte is the eighth French work which the company has produced. Samson et Dalila next year will be the ninth.Stagings of Don Quichotte in the UK are rare indeed, the last one of significance probably having been English National Opera's in 1994 Read more ...
David Nice
Rolling hills with beech-rich woods sloping upwards from a wide valley: the Wormsley Estate has more than a little in common with glorious Hukvaldy in Moravia, where Janáček was born and ended his life, and where in old age he once again saw "his" vixen. With an admirable independence of mind that seriously underrated director Daniel Slater has gone against the grain inside the fabulous pavilion where Garsington’s operas now resound. Instead of extending the natural scene, Robert Innes Hopkins’s simple but original designs paper the walls of the inn where most of the action takes place Read more ...