Opera Reviews

Platée, Opera du Rhin

Ismene Brown Friday, 26 March 2010

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.

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The Cunning Little Vixen, Royal Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Saturday, 20 March 2010

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

I have no compunction laying into vastly overrated composers, crazily overpaid conductors or ...

Katya Kabanova, English National Opera

David Nice Monday, 15 March 2010

It's amazing how much you can tell of what lies ahead from the way a conductor handles a master composer's first chord. Katya Kabanova's opening sigh of muted violas and cellos underpinned by double basses should tell us that the Volga into which the self-persecuted heroine will eventually throw herself is a river, real or metaphorical, of infinite breadth and depth.

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Kaija Saariaho's Émilie, Opéra de Lyon

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Tuesday, 09 March 2010

Émilie du Châtelet: 'Châtelet (Karita Mattila) staggers around her orrery study barefoot like a 19th-century hysteric: temperamental, mystical and totally doolally.'

The new millennium shimmered into earshot with a musical masterpiece from a female Finn. Kaija Saariaho's L'Amour de Loin (2000) appeared to open up an enticing new operatic sound world, less dogmatic, more instinctive, colourful and intense, very much like the work's model, Debussy's Pélleas et Mélisande, had done a hundred years before. Ten years on, the critical establishment descended on Lyon for Saariaho's third opera, Émilie - which comes to the Barbican in...

Tamerlano, Royal Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Friday, 05 March 2010

Graham Vick's Tamerlano is less of an opera and more of a warning. In four and half hours you see 26 ways of how not to handle the Baroque aria. Dramatic success in Handel and his psychological flights of mainly soliloquising fancy is never easy but last night's ill-fated Royal Opera House production (Placido Domingo called in sick a few weeks back) was a lesson in abject theatrical failure.

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Philip Glass: Satyagraha, ENO/ LSO, Alsop, Barbican

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Thursday, 25 February 2010

It has always been a cornerstone of my personal philosophy that beauty and insight can be found in the very lowest of common denominators. That Big Brother, Friends, Love It magazine or Paris Hilton provide revelations about life that are of as much consequence, of as much wonder, as any offered up by the classic pantheon. That that which the people respond to must and usually does have plenty of merit lurking within it.

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La Traviata, Chelsea Opera Group, QEH

David Nice Sunday, 21 February 2010

Marie Duplessis, Alexandre Dumas the Younger's real-life "lady of the camellias", was only 23 when consumption finally claimed her. Ignore a few lines about youth in Verdi's operatic treatment, though, and there's no reason why courtesan Violetta shouldn't be a woman of advancing years who finds true love with a man half her age or more; think Chéri (Colette's novel, not the film if you please).

The Elixir of Love, English National Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Saturday, 13 February 2010

It takes roughly, ooh, about five minutes for Jonathan Miller's new production of Donizetti's The Elixir of Love (whose 1950s set had the audience gawping smilingly within seconds) to start electrifying the nerve-endings into orgasmic spasm.

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The Gambler, Royal Opera House

David Nice Friday, 12 February 2010

Fasten your seatbelts; it's a bumpy ride to the casino. In Prokofiev's wilful but uncompromising take on Dostoyevsky's tale of obsession, all the private paths of love, lust and greed lead to the gambling tables - eventually. The composer saves up one of the most adrenalin-charged scenes in 20th-century opera for the last act, giving director and conductor some headaches in generating interest and comprehensibility along the way. With a dedication we can only imagine, Richard Jones and...

Ruddigore, Opera North

graham Rickson Friday, 05 February 2010

A magical Ruddigore: Richard Burkhard as Sir Despard Murgatroyd (left) and Grant Doyle as Robin Oakapple

The plot of this rarely performed Gilbert and Sullivan spoof melodrama is gloriously amusing. The male heirs of the Murgatroyd family suffer under a witch’s curse which forces them to commit a crime each day, or suffer an agonising death. Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd has fled the ancestral home and now lives under a pseudonym, meaning that his younger brother Despard has had to assume both the baronetcy and the duty to commit the daily crime. Unlike his older brother's dastardly penchant for stealing...