Opera
David Nice
The best that you can usually expect from an interview is that it takes off from stock beginnings in spontaneous and unexpected directions. This one was rather exciting from the start: the end of a day in the life of a new role, Puccini's good-time girl Manon Lescaut, for lyric-dramatic soprano Kristine Opolais. To be working in the company of Antonio Pappano and Jonas Kaufmann as her tenor love – real-life husband is fellow Latvian and great conductor Andris Nelsons – was no more than she already deserved, but Manon had come alive for her at that day’s Royal Opera rehearsal for the first Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Before curtain-up on the opening night of this revival of Penny Woolcock’s production of The Pearl Fishers, ENO's head of casting arrived on stage with a microphone. No doubt delightful company in person, he was an unwelcome sight here. Sophie Bevan had a stomach bug, he explained – the disappointment was palpable. But she'd be bravely singing anyway – grateful applause broke out. In the end, our goodwill was not called upon in the least, since Bevan's voice in her debut as Leïla was as strong and agile as ever.As the overture plays this production offers its most visually arresting moment, Read more ...
David Nice
What a red letter day it is when a work you’ve always thought of as problematic seems at last, if only temporarily, to have no kind of fault or flaw. That was the case for me on Sunday afternoon with Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, launching this year’s Aldeburgh Festival with an ideal cast fused as one with the young Britten-Pears Orchestra thanks to the self-evidently intensive collaboration of director Neil Bartlett and conductor Mark Wigglesworth.Britten always demanded the highest standards of artists he could trust (and, as movingly described in a programme article by Read more ...
Ismene Brown
In the midst of ferment as the arts world faces fast-shrinking public subsidy, Sir John Tusa, former managing director of the BBC World Service and the Barbican Arts Centre, publishes this week a brisk new book that urges arts and politicians to reject the emotive clichés and lazy token battles and focus on what matters. In Pain in the Arts, Tusa urges that both sides take personal responsibility for an essential part of human life.His title, beyond the dubious pun, refers to the very real, and feared, pain in the long-established arts world right now, caused by current government pressure Read more ...
graham.rickson
These annual treks to Leeds Town Hall on muggy June evenings have become a bit of a tradition. Going to see Opera North’s Ring feels increasingly like attending a fan convention, though instead of wearing tight lycra and assorted helmets, attendees tend to sport sensible footwear, smart trousers and blue blazers. Would Wagner have approved of this performance of Götterdämmerung? His theatre at Bayreuth was designed so that the musicians would be hidden. The Leeds Grand Theatre pit is too small for a Wagnerian orchestra, so Opera North have upped sticks and moved a few hundred yards west to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The practical considerations and limitations of choosing a work for a student showcase can lead to some wonderfully original programming. It doesn’t get much more original than a pairing of Thomas Arne’s ballad opera The Cooper with Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista, currently being staged by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.The new Milton Court Theatre is the natural home for something like the Arne – an intimate, close-quarters space where you can see your neighbours’ reactions as well as the action on stage. Which makes it all the more odd that the work’s broad comedy never Read more ...
David Nice
Richard Strauss was born in Munich 150 years ago today. Christian Thielemann is celebrating the fact by conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden in the juiciest of all-Strauss operatic potpourris, a festive concert to be held in the city’s glorious Semperoper. What wouldn’t I give to hear Anja Harteros, alongside Anne Schwanewilms the loveliest of Strauss sopranos, and chaste nymph Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel in a peerless operatic epilogue? In fact the Dresden Music Festival, my host, ended yesterday and seems to function as a separate entity with its own period-instrument orchestra. I Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
How delicious that Garsington Opera has turned to Offenbach. The main impetus for this cheering development, taken up by Artistic Director Douglas Boyd, is conductor David Parry, who both translates (extremely well) and wields the baton.Parry was recently legated a set of Offenbach scores gathered by the late Patric Schmid, father of Opera Rara, for a planned recording project spanning extracts from many of the French composer’s lesser-known operettas. Could this open up the prospect of numerous rarities to come? Something to equal Leonard Ingrams’ teasing out of Haydn operas, then rarer Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Sex farce, class comedy, crime thriller, existential tragedy, supernatural shocker - Don Giovanni is, as Jonathan Kent notes about his production in the Glyndebourne programme, a cabinet of curiosities. Mozart's music hurdles to and fro across two centuries, the baroque 18th century and the disorientating romantic depths of the 19th; the characters are either stock (Leporello the comic sidekick, Anna the wronged virgin) or so subtle that they need redefining for every staging and every time (Elvira, and the lothario Don Giovanni himself). But again and again, Mozart’s 1787 opera proves itself Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
If the Hungarian State Opera wanted to demonstrate that it is now back on top form, it could not have chosen a better way than this six-opera celebration of Richard Strauss’s 150th anniversary. Mahler conducted here before moving to Hamburg, Vienna and New York. Filled with new ambition, after a contractual shake-up under General Manager Szilveszter Ókovács, Budapest displays revitalised strength and amazing depth in all departments.The 2014 Strauss showpiece was a national premiere: Hungary’s belated first staging of Die Frau ohne Schatten, the fairy-tale opera with which Strauss and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Tumblers, confetti, stiltwalkers, flags, crowds, a giant skull, and that’s just the overture. If anyone thought that Terry Gilliam might struggle to match the scope, scale or impact of 2011’s Damnation of Faust with his follow-up then they’re probably feeling rather foolish right about now.Gilliam’s Benvenuto Cellini is one of the most expensive productions ever seen at English National Opera. It’s also a notoriously challenging, rarely-staged hybrid of a work that failed (repeatedly) during the composer’s lifetime, and has since been largely consigned to the concert hall. So was it all worth Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Jonathan Kent was an actor before he was a director. Indeed, he had not directed a single play when in his mid-40s he assumed control of the Almeida Theatre in 1990. By the time he and his co-artistic director Ian McDiarmid has left more than a decade later, they had enforced a vital shift in the ecology of London theatre. Kent lured big names to work for small paychecks: Diana Rigg and Ralph Fiennes were soon followed by the likes of Kevin Spacey, Juliette Binoche, Liam Neeson and Cate Blanchett. The theatre put down roots in the West End, invaded the old Gainsborough Studios and took up Read more ...