Opera Reviews
Idomeneo, English National OperaSaturday, 19 June 2010
It's official, like it or not: director Katie Mitchell is the high priestess appointed to make plain the ways of ancient family sacrifice to modern man. She had the high ground of collaborating with composer James MacMillan on his stunning new opera The Sacrifice, based on a Mabinogion revenge saga; but the jury's still out... Read more... |
Macbeth, GlyndebourneFriday, 18 June 2010
Shakespeare's Macbeth is full of fleetingly funny moments. Halfway through the regicidal Second Act, we stumble upon a castle porter gibbering on about the bodily consequences of drink - "nose-painting, sleep and urine". Verdi's opera mostly shuns these vignettes for the bigger, more concentratedly darker picture. The music works itself up into an ornamented mania and for the most part broods on low orchestral colourings. There is nothing funny about a single second of it. Read more... |
Gareth Goes to Glyndebourne, BBC TwoThursday, 17 June 2010
We love Gareth Malone, don’t we? We are big fans of the Pied Piper of primetime. And so we should be. The youth of today seem impressively eager to down tools, put away childish things like knives and drugs and safe-cracking equipment, and follow this slightly weedy and totally uncool choirmaster out onto the concert platform. Our glorious new coalition should be using him to tackle crime. Read more... |
The Love for Three Oranges, Grange Park OperaThursday, 17 June 2010
“Art and love, these have been my life,” sings Tosca in Puccini’s opera. “Music or words first?” the Countess worries in Strauss’s Capriccio. Now in the third of Grange Park’s operas this summer we have the warring advocates of tragedy, comedy, melodrama and farce in Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges. Could it be guilt at its own idle detachment that... Read more... |
Armida, Garsington OperaSunday, 06 June 2010
It's not hard to imagine the Bloomsburyites frolicking around the exquisite Garsington grounds in mock-ups of scenes from Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. Lady Ottoline, chateleine of the enchanted garden, would writhe as eastern sorceress Armida, though Lytton and co would hardly make a very butch bunch of opposing crusaders. To be honest, there wasn't much more testosterone or sex on show in Rossini's dramatically flimsy, musically elaborate operatic nod to Tasso last night, and the... Read more... |
Le nozze di Figaro, Garsington OperaSunday, 06 June 2010
The sun rode high, the gardens glowed green, my lemon berry pudding bulged proudly and, on stage, the familiar 24-carat farce that is Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro was working itself out to perfection. It was Garsington - and my baking - at its very finest, a fittingly triumphant opening to the final season at Garsington Manor (they move down the road to Wormsley Estate next year). |
Capriccio, Grange Park OperaSaturday, 05 June 2010
By far the most uncomfortable – perhaps the only uncomfortable - thing about Richard Strauss’s last opera is the date of its first performance. In October 1942 the battle of El Alamein was raging and the British were bombing German cities while the Munich opera audience were entertained by a rambling disquisition on the respective merits of poetry and music as art forms, set in an eighteenth-century French château. What modern director could resist this provocation? Stephen Medcalf...
Read more...
|
Mary Stuart, Opera NorthSaturday, 05 June 2010
Among the many pleasures of Donizetti's Mary Stuart is the fun of watching a chunk of primary-school history filtered through a florid bel canto imagination. There are moments when you want to cry out, “That’s not what happened!” But it’s so fast-moving, so well-paced, that you soon stop complaining and just surrender. Read more... |
What Makes a Great Tenor? BBC FourWednesday, 02 June 2010
Thus I approached What Makes a Great Tenor? in a spirit of moderate scepticism. Had appearing on Popstar to Operastar destroyed at a stroke the credibility of its presenter, the Mexican tenor Rolando Villazón?
Read more...
|
Rick Stein's Food of the Italian Opera, BBC FourWednesday, 02 June 2010
Golfing for Cats: Alan Coren once invented the perfect book title on the basis that if you combined those who follow the activities of Tiger Woods with those who adore smaller domestic felines, you have a massive demographic primed to buy your last tome. Likewise for TV commissioning editors, there must be something tempting about the high-concept hybrid. 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...
Batiashvili, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - French and Poli...
Three live, very alive Symphonie fantastiques in a year may seem a lot. But such is Berlioz’s precise, unique and somehow modern...
Music Reissues Weekly: Johnnie Taylor - Who's Making Lo...
Johnnie Taylor’s big break came with the ever-fabulous September 1968 single “Who's Making Love.” His ninth 45 for the Stax label, it went Top Ten...
Faust, Royal Opera review - pure theatre in this solid reviv...
“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...
Mrs. Warren's Profession, Garrick Theatre review - moth...
How do you make Bernard Shaw sear the stage anew? You can trim the text, as the director Dominic Cooke has, bringing this prolix writer's 1893...
Mongrel review - deeply empathetic filmmaking from Taiwan
There is a dark, spectral quality to this compassionate film about Southeast Asian migrant workers in rural Taiwan. At the centre...
Owen, Manchester Camerata, Takács-Nagy, Stoller Hall, Manche...
Manchester Camerata spent eight years performing and recording a complete edition of Mozart’s piano concertos with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet as soloist...
The Phoenician Scheme review - further adventures in the idi...
It’s not what he says, it’s the way he says it. Few filmmakers have bent the term “auteur” to their own ends more boldly than...
Album: Ammar 808 - Club Tounsi
Ammar 808 is the high octane vehicle for the Tunisian-born producer Sofyann Ben Youssef, now based in Denmark. His first album Maghreb United...