fri 04/04/2025

Opera Reviews

Prom 64: Les Troyens, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Sousa review - ravishing interpretation of Berlioz's masterpiece

Rachel Halliburton

It’s one of the great tragedies of Les Troyens that its composer never got to hear it performed in its entirety during his lifetime. This ravishing, big-hearted interpretation of the two of the most dramatic episodes in Virgil’s Aeneid was dismissed by orchestras that could not comprehend its technical or emotional demands, with the consequence that there was no attempt at a proper staging till 21 years after Berlioz's death.

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Tannhäuser, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Edinburgh International Festival 2023 - compelling concert Wagner

Christopher Lambton

This was one of the more strait-laced concert performances, with few concessions to Wagner’s underlying stage drama. The soloists were in formal concert dress, strung out in a line at the front of the stage, with interaction between them limited to looks of anguish and the sparest of gestures. The shepherd boy in Act 1 was banished to the upper reaches of the organ gallery, and there was a substantial off-stage band in Act 2, but otherwise there was nothing to distract us from the music.

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Prom 43: Endgame, BBC Scottish SO, Ryan Wigglesworth review - beautiful sounds but slow, slow drama

Bernard Hughes

György Kurtág is 97 and the last man standing of the post-war generation of avant-garde composers. Last night the Proms staged the UK premiere of his first opera, started in his eighties and premiered in 2018, a setting of Samuel Beckett’s typically mystifying play Endgame.

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Prom 31: Dialogues des Carmélites, Glyndebourne, BBC Radio 3 review - full force on air

David Nice

“There will be more incense,” promised Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati of the company’s annual visit to the Proms. He was talking to my Opera Zoom class between the final rehearsal and first performance of Poulenc’s great masterpiece about the martyrdom of Carmelite nuns during the French revolution, as directed by Barrie Kosky with unsparing horror and humanity. And now here was the operatic company of the year taking its final bow after a sellout run in Sussex.

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The Pilgrim's Progress, Three Choirs Festival review - revelatory performance by young musicians

stephen Walsh

Whatever your opinion of Vaughan Williams, it’s unlikely that you think of him as an essentially theatrical composer.

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Semele, Glyndebourne review - the dark side of desire

Boyd Tonkin

It never rains but it pours – and hails, snows or, above all, thunders. The presiding tone of Semele, in Adele Thomas’s new production for Glyndebourne, matches the current English summer with its grey skies, glowering clouds and stormy outbursts. Jove’s evidently in a rage, despite his rejuvenating lust for the Theban king’s daughter, Semele.

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The Magic Flute, Clonter Opera review - inventive ideas on the farm

Robert Beale

Necessity has to be the mother of invention for many operatic enterprises these days – and there are few with such inventive powers as those of Clonter Opera in Cheshire.

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L'Orfeo, Longborough Festival Opera review - landmark opera survives rock-star wedding and hospital soap

Boyd Tonkin

Cotswold Line railway stations currently sport posters for Alex James’s “Big Feastival”, in which the ex-Blur bassist hosts a food-and-music jamboree on his cheese-making farm. Just up the road at Longborough Festival Opera, the crowd gathered on stage for the nuptials of Orfeo and Euridice would fit snugly in chez James as well.

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theartsdesk at the Buxton International Festival - bel canto in the High Peak

Robert Beale

Bellini’s La Sonnambula is the highspot of a four-show lyric theatre bill at the Buxton International Festival this year, and demonstrates again how beautifully suited the small Matcham opera house in the High Peak is to mid-19th century bel canto repertoire.

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The Bartered Bride, Garsington Opera review - brilliant revival of a comedy of cruelty

stephen Walsh

Smetana’s enchanting bitter-sweet comedy is probably on the danger-list for cancellation by the modern guardians of our moral sanctity. The plot hinges, like Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, on the cash-sale of the hero’s bride (in Hardy, the wife and daughter): not nice, and surely a risky hint to any young men in the audience teetering on the brink.

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