Opera Reviews
Elektra, Gergiev, LSO, Barbican HallThursday, 14 January 2010
Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra is a diabolical piece of work - less an opera than an event determined to cut its mark. A vast orchestra of 112 players unleashes a two-hour tsunami of sound across the stage, on which female voices are buffeted like pieces of driftwood, shrieking of mothers who murder husbands, daughters who want to murder mothers, rivers of blood, flayed horses, dogs, bodies. Subtle it isn’t. Loud it is. In the hands of Valery Gergiev and London Symphony Orchestra... Read more...
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The Seckerson Tapes: Edward and Igor look back at 2009Saturday, 02 January 2010
Since before Christmas theartsdesk has been reviewing the past decade and previewing the year to come in the arts. As an extra we offer this special edition of The Seckerson Tapes, in which Edward Seckerson and Igor Toronyi-Lalic discuss the year in music, which, in the concert hall, saw the triumph of the new romantics in conductors Riccardo Chailly and Yannick Nezet-Seguin and, operatically, saw the arrival of three penetrating new productions of operatic classics: the... Read more... |
Classical and Opera 2000-9: The Highs and LowsSunday, 27 December 2009
No great new movements or radically transformational figures emerged to dominate classical music in the Noughties (not even him up there). Just one small nagging question bedevilled us: will the art form survive? Well, it has. What appeared to be a late 20th-century decline in audience interest in the classical tradition was in fact a consumer weariness with the choices on offer. |
La Bohème, Royal OperaMonday, 21 December 2009
Very few of the staged goings-on in Covent Garden’s revival production of La Bohème this weekend rose above the level of mediocrity. The singing was blighted by illness and Eastern European bad habits. The 1970s set was as fresh as a fridge full of condemned meats. The 1970s vision of 19th century costume was extraordinary, as if the set of Abigail's Party had been emptied over the singers' heads. And yet, what an enjoyable evening. |
Imagine: Placido Domingo - The Time of My Life, BBC OneTuesday, 15 December 2009
How old Placido Domingo? Old Placido Domingo in not bad vocal health, to paraphrase Cary Grant's celebrated telegram reply. The other answer depends on your source of reference. Domingo is 68 in the eyes of last night's rather lazy, over-reverent Imagine, but 75 according to my not so New Everyman Dictionary of Music. Where did that come from? Read more... |
Carmen, Live from La Scala broadcastTuesday, 08 December 2009
It was well worth a dash down a rain-deluged Shaftesbury Avenue to catch this live digital broadcast from Milan at the Odeon, Covent Garden. For a start it meant saving a plane fare and a ticket at 250 euros or (much) more, and it also meant eavesdropping in vivid close-up on what may have been a nugget of history in the making at the grand old opera house. Read more... |
Der Rosenkavalier, Royal OperaMonday, 07 December 2009
Seeking the snows of yesteryear, I remember a time when John Schlesinger's Covent Garden Rosenkavalier filled every moment of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's rococo libretto and Richard Strauss's jewel-studded score with life and meaning. 25 years on, its creator is no more, a revival director (Andrew Sinclair) fails to pull a dramatically variable cast together and many startling new productions have shown more readiness to engage with the opera's Viennese time machine... Read more... |
Otello, LSO, Sir Colin Davis, BarbicanSunday, 06 December 2009
Let's suppose that off-centre genius among opera directors Richard Jones had been asked to bring his imagination to bear on Sir Colin Davis's latest Verdi-in-concert. I imagine he might have weighed up leading men, chorus and the conductor's unexpected blend of manicure with flash alongside swathes of masterful beauty, and decided to follow up his 1940s Windsor Falstaff at Glyndebourne with a 1970s Otello set in Surbiton. Read more... |
Swanhunter, Opera NorthSunday, 22 November 2009
The violin figure which opens Jonathan Dove’s delightful Swanhunter evokes Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat. The allusion is surely deliberate. Like L’Histoire, and in contrast to Pinocchio, Dove’s large-scale Opera North commission of two years ago, Swanhunter is a 70-minute, chamber-sized work designed for performance in small venues. Read more... |
The Tsarina's Slippers, Royal Opera HouseSaturday, 21 November 2009
A vain, capricious girl sends her lunk of a suitor on a quest for the best ruby slippers in the world, while said lunk's mother, the village witch, cosies up to the Devil. It's a whimsical Christmas Eve tale, exuberantly narrated by Nikolay Gogol in his Ukrainian-based Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka; but you wouldn't think there would be much room for pathos and sentiment. Trust Tchaikovsky to favour the heartfelt and the melancholy in his very characteristic early opera Vakula... Read more... |
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