thu 03/04/2025

Opera Reviews

Don Carlo, Royal Opera review - Lise Davidsen soars above routine

David Nice

Not a good start. The tenor (Brian Jagde) walks downstage and sings loudly, if securely, to the audience: hardly a characterisation of an idealistic young Infante meditating on love. The next voice, the Page’s, is barely heard (Ella Taylor gets better). Then we have The Presence: Lise Davidsen, who you know is Elisabeth de Valois in the only carefree mode she’s to experience throughout the opera.

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Out of Her Mouth, Dunedin Consort, Mahogany Opera, Hera, Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh review - she carried a watermelon

Miranda Heggie

A joint venture between Dunedin Consort, Mahogany Opera and intersectional feminist opera company Hera, Out of Her Mouth is a semi-staged version of three short baroque cantatas. Written by French composer Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, each is based on a different woman from the Old Testament.

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Candide, Welsh National Opera review - vaut le voyage, just for the visual side

stephen Walsh

If you read the synopsis of Candide - which I strongly advise if you plan a visit to this new WNO production - you may well wonder how it will be possible to get through so much in so short a time. Voltaire’s novella is itself fairly short, but opera takes more time and songs are songs, not action.

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Werther, Grange Park Opera review - Italian-American principal singers with strong chemistry

Sebastian Scotney

Grange Park Opera has been setting a high standard in French opera ever since the company's first proper season in 1999. This Werther is the company's third by Jules Massenet. The first two were rarities, pioneering efforts: a fascinating tussle between lubriciousness and piety in Thais in 2006, and then a poignant and deeply felt portrayal of old age in a splendid Don Quichotte in 2014.

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Ariadne auf Naxos, Garsington Opera review - golden thread leads to deep emotion

David Nice

When tears well up during stretches of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s curious hybrid which you never expected to move you, something special's going on. The magic happened last night in an evening which I didn't anticipate equalling “the Carmelites experience” at Glyndebourne. But, in its very different way, it did, in terms of casting, conducting and a production (by Bruno Ravella) that wasn’t too interventionist but had some powerful ideas of its own.

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Everest, Barbican review - a powerful operatic debut from Joby Talbot

alexandra Coghlan

Schubert gave us a winter’s journey for the 19th century: a wandering lover brooding, remembering, fantasising, maybe even dying to the chilly accompanying churn of the hurdy-gurdy man. In Everest, composer Joby Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer recreate it for the 21st.

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Il trovatore, Royal Opera review - heaven and hell

David Nice

The trouble with Trovatore, Verdi’s sometimes barrel-organish, slightly middle-aged troubadour, isn’t so much the silly shocker of a plot, triggered by a gypsy so crazed with vengeance that she throws her own baby on a bonfire by mistake, as the choppy dramatic line, so hard to thread. Under the circumstance, Adele Thomas’s medieval-hell production could have been a lot worse, and the vocal quality is there throughout under Antonio Pappano’s watchful guidance.

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Werther, Royal Opera review - Kaufmann off form in this stiff revival

alexandra Coghlan

Benoit Jacquot’s handsome period production of Werther has been quietly putting in the miles for the Royal Opera.

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L'elisir d'amore, Longborough Festival review - agreeable nonsense in a semi-modern English village

stephen Walsh

Frederick Delius composed an opera called A Village Romeo and Juliet; Donizetti composed a sort of village Tristan and Isolde, but called it L’elisir d’amoreThe Love Potion. The hero, Nemorino, inspired by the Tristan tale, buys an elixir off a passing quack, in the hope it will make the beautiful, capricious Adina fall for him.

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Hansel and Gretel, Opera Holland Park review - the Great Grimm Bake-Off

Boyd Tonkin

Like any decent cake (and we saw plenty on the Holland Park stage), a tasty production of Hansel and Gretel needs a careful balance of flavours. Sweet and sharp; light and dark; fantasy and realism; fright and delight. Directed by John Wilkie, Opera Holland Park’s version of Engelbert Humperdinck’s well-preserved “fairy-tale opera” from 1893 skilfully mixes its ingredients into a sort of Great Grimm Bake-Off. It hints at horrors but never really threatens to turn sour.

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