Opera Reviews
Mazeppa, Grange Park Opera review - a gripping reassessmentMonday, 16 June 2025
Tchaikovsky has precisely two operas in the standard repertoire (including The Queen of Spades, currently playing at Garsington), and readers who love those works might well be forgiven for wondering what happened to the other eight or nine. On the evidence of Grange Park’s Mazeppa, the answer might seem to be pure mischance. Read more... |
Saul, Glyndebourne review - playful, visually ravishing descent into darknessTuesday, 10 June 2025
This thrilling production of Saul takes Handel’s dramatisation of the Bible’s first Book of Samuel and paints it in pictures ranging from grotesque exuberance to monochromatic expressionism. From the earliest flamboyant images, dominated by the disquieting presence of Goliath’s decapitated head, to an encounter with the Witch of Endor that has the starkness of Beckett, this tale of jealousy and betrayal grips you to the bitter end. Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Nevill Holt Festival/Opera North review - re-writing the scriptSunday, 08 June 2025
Marianne Moore once famously defined poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Operas also fill, or anyway should fill, their artificial horticulture with genuine beasts – and flowers. And no work demands the population of a fanciful landscape with authentic passion more urgently than Così fan tutte. Read more... |
La Straniera, Chelsea Opera Group, Barlow, Cadogan Hall review - diva power saves minor BelliniMonday, 02 June 2025
Chelsea Opera Group has made its own luck in winning the devotion of two great bel canto exponents: Nelly Miricioiu between 1998 and 2010, Helena Dix over the past 10 years. Last night was Dix’s official farewell before moving back to her native Australia. La Straniera may be a relative dud among Bellini’s operas, but it allows its soprano grace, poise and careful fireworks. An excellent cast reflected her mastery; but the conducting nearly sank the enterprise. Read more... |
The Queen of Spades, Garsington Opera review - sonorous gliding over a heart of darknessMonday, 02 June 2025
Recent events have prompted the assertion – understandable in Ukraine – that the idea of the Russian soul is a nationalist myth. This production reminded me that it isn’t, if only by telling us of what we’ve lost: the majority of those great Russian singers and conductors who lit up previous stagings of Tchaikovsky’s dark masterpiece. Read more... |
The Flying Dutchman, Opera Holland Park review - into the storm of dreamsWednesday, 28 May 2025
Thankfully, Julia Burbach’s version of The Flying Dutchman for Opera Holland Park doesn’t try to be one of those concept-laden productions that banishes all sight of the sea. Read more... |
Il Trittico, Opéra de Paris review - reordered Puccini works for a phenomenal singing actorTuesday, 27 May 2025
So here in Paris, as at Salzburg in 2022, it’s no longer “Puccini’s Trittico” but “the Asmik Grigorian Trittico 3-1-2”. Which would be a very bad idea if she were a lazy diva like Anna Netrebko. But Grigorian works selflessly within wonderfully strong casts. In league with Christof Loy’s viscerally demanding productions and Carlo Rizzi’s infinitely sympathetic conducting, she sets the seal on one of the greatest operatic events I’ve ever experienced. Read more... |
Faust, Royal Opera review - pure theatre in this solid revivalSaturday, 24 May 2025
“Satan come to me!” The Devil doesn’t so much appear in David McVicar’s Faust as reveal himself to have always been there. We discover him – travelling trunk and brandy glass to hand, lazy smile on his lips – considering the interior of designer Charles Edwards’ magnificent church in Gounod’s own Second Empire Paris. And why not? Read more... |
Pygmalion, Early Opera Company, Curnyn, Middle Temple Hall review - Rameau magic outside the opera houseWednesday, 21 May 2025
With French baroque opera all but banished from the UK’s major opera companies, it’s left to concert halls and country houses to fill the void. There’s a full-length treat ahead this summer with Rameau’s opéra-ballet Les Indes Galantes at Hampshire’s Grange Festival, but first Temple Music served up an amuse-bouche from Christian Curnyn and his Early Opera Company. Read more... |
Parsifal, Glyndebourne review - the music flies up, the drama remains belowMonday, 19 May 2025
There’s a grail, but it doesn't glow in a mundane if perverted Christian ritual. Three of the main characters have young and old actor versions and the “wonder-working spear” is a knife in a Cain and Abel story superimposed on Wagner’s myth (as if that wasn’t complicated enough). Kundry, whom the composer defines as literally flying between “good” and “bad” worlds, enters primly in the first two acts bearing a tea-tray. Read more... |
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