wed 02/04/2025

Opera Reviews

Orfeo ed Euridice, Opera North review - more than a concert

Robert Beale

Though billed as a “concert performance”, this was really much more than that. With the resources of their own theatre, Opera North’s team present a staging that employs a big, built-up and raked floor, with a simple platform in the centre and a starry-night black back-cloth, and their principals and chorus move and act in simple but effective style.

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theartsdesk at Wexford Festival Opera - the bad, the good and the glorious

David Nice

Festival punters who eagerly return to this pleasant haven in south-east Ireland are happy to take a risk on the three rare operas served up each year. As a Wexford virgin, I knew I wanted to come here this autumn for Dvořák’s last opera Armida, revealed on recordings as a glorious score at every turn, even when the dramaturgy falters, and for Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, already a world-class Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin, as the eponymous lovelorn sorcerer.

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Orpheus, Opera North review - cross-cultural opera in action

Robert Beale

Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical music.

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La bohème, Glyndebourne Tour review - Death and the Parisienne doing the rounds

David Nice

The sopranos are Ethiopian-Italian and Hispanic-American, the tenor Uzbek, the baritones South African (no EU principals, but it seems you can't have everything). This is opera at its best: the cream of international singers coming together to make a unified work of art under a director with a vision and a conductor who gives it all total security as well as freedom. It may be the tour, but it’s vintage Glyndebourne.

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Tosca, English National Opera review - a tale of two eras

David Nice

Rome, 14/15 June 1800: the specifics of the original Sardou melodrama are preserved in Puccini’s thriller mixing love, lust, religion and tyranny. Many productions move forward in time, and sometimes change the place, with ease: after all, feudalist power-abusers remain with us. Director Christof Loy decides that police chief Scarpia and his allies should be of the era following the French revolution, while artist Cavaradossi is a “timeless” freedom fighter.

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Aida, Royal Opera review - dour but disciplined

David Nice

No gods, ancient Egyptian or otherwise; no sinister priest along the lines of Russia’s antichrist Patriarch Kiriil, sending soldiers to their deaths with the promise of heaven. Military ritual under what looks like a Russian/Chinese flag prevails in Robert Carsen’s severe take on Aida, more rigid than Verdi’s surprisingly unified late score - a musical masterpiece if not a dramatic one.

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The Makropulos Affair, Welsh National Opera review - complexity realised brilliantly on the stage

stephen Walsh

What, anyway, is The Makropulos Case all about? Is it simply about the horrors of unnatural longevity; or does it expose the limitations of the rational mind confronted by the irrational; is it about love of a distorted ideal, like some updated Hoffmann tale?

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La rondine, If Opera review - a bold opening gambit from a company changing the business of opera

alexandra Coghlan

Covid has been devastating for all the arts, but especially opera – the riskiest and most expensive gamble of the lot. And it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near done yet. On one memorable night this summer the number of covers stepping into principal roles across the various country-house opera companies hit double figures. And not small ones. So what do we do? Crash on as before and hope for the best? Scale back and build in safeguards, both human and financial?

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Saul, The English Concert, Butt, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - properly exciting music drama

Simon Thompson

It’s not an opera, of course, but of all Handel’s oratorios, Saul is probably the one that is best suited to being presented as an actual drama.

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Patience, Charles Court Opera, Wilton's Music Hall review - bar room bliss

David Nice

“Twenty lovesick maidens we,” pining in stained-glass attitudes for florid poet Reginald Bunthorne, usually kick off Gilbert and Sullivan’s delicious mockery of the high (or cod) aesthetical. That might have been a problem for Charles Court Opera’s total cast of nine. Not so: the lights go up on three “melancholy”, Goth-sh maybe not-quite-“maidens", knocking it back at the bar of the Castle Inn, and we know we’re in the best of hands. The delight is unmodified over the next two hours.

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