wed 02/04/2025

Opera Reviews

Tosca, English National Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Rarely have I seen an opera where so much of the activity, so much of the detailed business of relating, loving, falling out and hating, has rung so true for so much of the time. And never do I remember this truthfulness coming from such simplicity. For, in terms of set, costume and conception, this is a very ordinary, recognisable, dependable, 19th-century Tosca.

Read more...

La Fille Du Régiment, Royal Opera

Ismene Brown

You can take the girl out of the barracks but you can’t take the barracks out of the girl would be one way to sum up Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (Daughter of the Regiment), which I can’t conceive could have a more ribtickling production, more brilliantly sung, than the delight that opened last night at Covent Garden. Kill, as they say, to get a ticket. It has Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Flórez, Ann Murray and Dawn French, and in a starring supporting role comes one of the...

Read more...

After Life, Barbican

alexandra Coghlan

"We need to inform you officially. Mr Walter, you died yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss." It comes as no great surprise to learn that Michel van der Aa’s opera After Life is based on a Japanese film. The Borgesian hyper-real scenario, the no-place location and meditative pacing all point, or rather - rejecting anything so crass - bow respectfully to their original source.

Read more...

Juan Diego Florez, Barbican Hall

Edward Seckerson

Can we clear something up once and for all, please? Yet again this week an all too familiar headline caught my eye: “Is Juan Diego Florez the heir apparent to Pavarotti?” Or words to that effect. Why do these lazy (and/or ill-informed) editors and their headline writers keep asking the same rhetorical question? Surely they should know by now that the answer is a great big resounding “no”.

Read more...

Powder Her Face, RO, Linbury Studio Theatre

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Sexy but not scandalous: the 'vocally terrific' Joan Rodgers as the Duchess

Let's get straight to the fellatio, shall we. The blow job - and its Polaroid rendition - that led to the 1960s divorce trial of the dissolute Duchess of Argyll forms the centrepiece aria (an aria that "begins with words and ends with humming") in Thomas Adès's opera Powder Her Face. And how good we were: as silent as a row of...

Read more...

Aida, Royal Opera House

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

David McVicar's new Aida production had an opening mise en scène of such unashamed ugliness, a revolving main feature (a wall of scaffolding) of such audacious featurelessness, a wardrobe of such brazen tastelessness (think Dungeons and Dragons), that my critical faculties sort of went into a coma.

Read more...

Elegy for Young Lovers, ENO, Young Vic

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

We all know what you get when you find yourself snowed in with your family up a mountain: thunderous carpets, corridors of blood, redrum and a head in the snow.

Read more...

Prima Donna, Sadler's Wells

David Nice

Why write gluey pastiche Massenet and Puccini when you could compose as your flamboyant self? Why collaborate on a cliché-ridden French text when your song lyrics declare themselves so piquantly in English? Rufus Wainwright must have his own reasons for concocting a fantasy of what opera might, or used to, be.

Read more...

Platée, Opera du Rhin

Ismene Brown

French geography has a significant hand in the small but exuberantly formed opera and dance that comes out of that civilised country - scaled for the important theatres that lie far beyond Paris and which have a great deal to teach Britain about creating a vivid national landscape.

Read more...

The Cunning Little Vixen, Royal Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic The Vixen and the lard-arse Hens: 'love and loss and the joys of being alive'

I have no compunction laying into vastly overrated composerscrazily overpaid conductors or ...

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...

Stiletto, Charing Cross Theatre review - new musical excess

That friend you have who hates musicals – probably male, probably straight, probably not seen one since The Sound of...

Apex Predator, Hampstead Theatre review - poor writing turns...

Motherhood is a high stress job. Ask any woman and they will tell you the same: sleepless nights, feeding problems and worry. Lots of worry. Lots...

Album: Elton John and Brandi Carlile - Who Believes in Angel...

Spring may have sprung, but there’s little in life to truly raise the sprits, so this week’s release of Who Believes in Angels? ...

Balanchine: Three Signature Works, Royal Ballet review - exu...

Is the Royal Ballet a “Balanchine company”? The question was posed at a recent Insight evening to Patricia Neary, the tireless dancer...

theartsdesk Q&A: filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on his apo...

Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014...

Howard Amos: Russia Starts Here review - East meets West, vi...

Russia Starts Here: Real Lives in the Ruin of Empire, the journalist Howard Amos’ first book, is a prescient and fascinating examination...

DVD/Blu-ray: The Substance

“I knew I wanted all the effects practical and made for real. The movie is about flesh and bones, about women’s bodies.”

Coralie Fargeat,...

A Working Man - Jason Statham deconstructs villains again

The typical Jason Statham movie character – muscular, resourceful, drily humorous – could probably carve an army into mincemeat using a few odds...

Connolly, BBC Philharmonic, Paterson, Bridgewater Hall, Manc...

The BBC Philharmonic took its Saturday night audience on a journey into French sonic luxuriance – in reverse order of historical formation,...