mon 17/02/2025

Opera Reviews

Mary, Queen of Scots, English National Opera review - heroic effort for an overcooked history lesson

David Nice

Genius doesn't always tally with equal opportunities, to paraphrase Doris Lessing. Opera houses have a duty to put on new works by women composers; sometimes an instant classic emerges. But to revive a music drama that hardly made waves back in 1977? Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots has some strong invention, and whizzes you through historical bullet points so quickly that there’s no chance to get bored. But does it deserve a company giving it their all?

Read more...

Festen, Royal Opera review - firing on every front

David Nice

So the Royal Opera had assembled a dream cast, conductor (Edward Gardner) and director (Richard Jones). The only question until last night was whether composer Mark-Anthony Turnage would be at his remarkable best. His operatic journey has been uneven, but one thing is now certain: adapting the first Dogme 95 movie, Festen by Thomas Vinterberg, so shocking at a time (1998) when the issue of child abuse rarely surfaced in drama, has yielded music theatre of flawless pace and range.

Read more...

Phaedra + Minotaur, Royal Ballet and Opera, Linbury Theatre review - a double dose of Greek myth

Jenny Gilbert

Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first lasts only 20 minutes) featuring the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and the havoc he wreaks, even in death.

Read more...

The Marriage of Figaro, Welsh National Opera review - no concessions and no holds barred

stephen Walsh

Drained as they are at present of crucial funds, WNO are managing to put on only two operas this spring, and spaced out to the point where it could hardly be called a season. For their new Peter Grimes we must wait till April. Meanwhile we can relish Tobias Richter’s sparkling nine-year-old Figaro, skilfully revived, with a few tweaks, by Max Hoehn.

Read more...

The Marriage of Figaro, English National Opera review - long on laughs, short on kerb appeal

alexandra Coghlan

Who’s in and who’s not – on the secret, the joke, the relationship, the family, the club? That’s the fulcrum of Joe Hill-Gibbins’ ingeniously simple Figaro for English National Opera. A white box and a row of doors supply the only set to speak of for a production less interested in the entrenched tensions of upstairs-downstairs than the shifting alliances and fragile coalitions of a household in flux.

Read more...

The Flying Dutchman, Opera North review - a director’s take on Wagner

Robert Beale

Saturday night could have given us the opportunity to witness the Opera North debut of Canadian soprano Layla Claire at the Grand Theatre, as well as Annabel Arden’s new production of The Flying Dutchman.

Read more...

Love Life, Opera North review - Lerner and Weill's blast into the past

Robert Beale

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in Love Life, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical from 1948, it’s all the same country. The couple whose marriage is at the centre of it all are seen in different eras of US history, and while they hardly age, the country changes vastly.

Read more...

Jenůfa, Royal Opera review - electrifying details undermined by dead space

David Nice

This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won him the role of Antonio Pappano’s successor as Music Director, which he takes up at the beginning in the 2025/6 season.

Read more...

Best of 2024: Opera

David Nice

Ireland takes the palm for best of 2024, with Wexford hitting comic heights among its three rarities in Donizettian let’s-make-an-opera, while Irish National Opera gave us a world-class Salome, a Vivaldi rarity strongly cast, a Rigoletto featuring my favourite performance from a Manchester-born Irish-Iranian soprano, and the perfect solution to Berlioz’s half-Shakespearean Béatrice et Bénédict, thanks to Fiona Shaw and three more sensational Irish women.

Read more...

La rondine, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - sumptuous orchestral playing in an underrated score

alexandra Coghlan

There are no battlement leaps or murderous vows, no pistols or daggers, not so much as a slight cough disturbs the serene plot of La rondine – the Puccini opera once labelled a “poor man’s Traviata”.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

Josienne Clarke, Across the Evening Sky, Kings Place review...

On the first date of a 17-concert tour that had its preview at Celtic Connections in January, Across the Evening Sky begins with the...

Shon Faye: Love in Exile review - the greatest feeling

As Valentine’s Day crests around us, and lonely hearts come out of their winter hibernation, what better time to publish writer and journalist...

Mary, Queen of Scots, English National Opera review - heroic...

Genius doesn't always tally with equal opportunities, to paraphrase Doris Lessing. Opera houses have a duty to put on new works by women composers...

Unicorn, Garrick Theatre review - wordy and emotionless desi...

Since when has new writing become so passionless? Mike Bartlett is one of the country’s premiere playwrights and his new play, Unicorn,...

Vollmond, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris...

Imagine: you take your seat at the best restaurant in town, the waiter arrives with a flourish to fill your water glass, you hold it out and he...

Patrick Duff, The Mount Without, Bristol review - sacred mus...

There is an atmosphere of otherworldly stillness within the stony womb of a large dilapidated church in...

Album: Tim Hecker - Shards

The question of personality in abstract and ambient music has always been a fascinating one. Without conventional signifiers of expressiveness,...

Music Reissues Weekly: Sharks - Car Crash Supergroup

Sharks were formed in 1972 by bassist Andy Fraser after he left Free. There were two albums, line-up changes and ripples which resonated after the...

Fat Dog, Chalk, Brighton review - a frenetic techno-rock jug...

Ro first saw Fat Dog, before anyone had heard of them, at the Windmill in Brixton in front of a crowd of about 25 people. Their manic energy blew...