Opera Reviews
Utopia, Limited, National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company review - bounded raptureMonday, 08 August 2022
Joseph Heller grew tired of being told that he’d never written anything as good as Catch 22. ‘Who has?’, he'd retort. In the same spirit, it’s futile to compare Gilbert and Sullivan’s late flop Utopia, Limited to The Mikado, The Gondoliers, Iolanthe or The Pirates of Penzance. Read more...
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Spell Book/La liberazione di Ruggiero dell'isola di Alcina, Longborough Festival review - the pitfalls of diversityMonday, 01 August 2022
Diversity is a great idea, but it can sometimes contain the seeds of its own downfall. Positive discrimination is an obvious, frequent example. Read more... |
Prom 13, The Wreckers, Glyndebourne review - an overloaded ship steered with prideMonday, 25 July 2022
Uncut, lovingly restored, and with two intervals in the antique manner, Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers invites its audience to embark on an epic voyage as well as a momentous one. This summer’s Glyndebourne Festival visit to the Proms brought us the rediscovered opera about a pious, paranoid community of Cornish ship-scavengers that the trail-blazing Smyth – who judged it her signature work – laboured over for several years before its premiere in Leipzig in 1906. Read more... |
Margot La Rouge/Le Villi, Opera Holland Park review – Parisian fancies and Black Forest gâteauFriday, 22 July 2022
Take an opera newbie along to Opera Holland Park’s double bill of rarities and they may have both their worst fears and their highest hopes confirmed. Outlandish plotting, overwrought melodrama and preposterous, supernatural stage business abounds. At the same time, some gorgeous music, memorable singing and dramatic coups make the whole fanciful spectacle soar and glow. Ecstasy and absurdity join clammy hands. Read more... |
Prom 7, Dido and Aeneas, La Nuova Musica review - bold and original from the startWednesday, 20 July 2022
How do you celebrate one of epic poetry’s richest female characters, a queen renowned across the Middle East and North Africa for being as politically powerful as she was magnetic? For Nahum Tate, the librettist for Dido and Aeneas, the curious answer is to push aside Dido’s achievements as a ruler and city builder and replace Virgil’s stirring metaphor for her plight with something, well, a little tamer. Read more... |
La donna del lago, Buxton International Festival 2022 review - Rossini’s romanticism for todayFriday, 15 July 2022
Buxton International Festival’s opera scene is clearly back on track for 2022, and its most substantial production a taut and tension-filled presentation of Rossini’s La Donna del Lago. Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Garsington Opera review - terrors and tragedyMonday, 11 July 2022
After the long interval, as darkness falls, the screw turns in this Garsington revival more woundingly than any I can remember for Britten's most concentrated masterpiece. Evil chords, trills, cadenzas and silences from the 13 superb Philharmonia players conducted by Mark Wigglesworth duly terrorise; Verity Wingate as the Governess to two orphaned children in a house which seems haunted by their former elders really does seem possessed. Read more... |
Alcina, Glyndebourne review - Handel on the strandMonday, 04 July 2022
Reviewing the Grange Festival production of Tamerlano the other day, I noted the difficulty Handel poses the modern director with his byzantine plots and often ludicrous love tangles, expressed through music of surpassing brilliance but mostly stereotyped forms. But at least Tamerlano is a comprehensible story with its feet planted firmly in a sort of reality. Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Royal Opera review - vibrant youth and vocal beautyThursday, 30 June 2022
Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, a stunning Elsa in this Royal Opera season's revival of Wagner’s Lohengrin, was the lure to sit through Jan Philipp Gloger's Mozart Così again (the title, by the way – "All Women Do It" – belies the complexity applied to a schematic plot). As it turned out, the mixed-up couples were all love’s young dream, which made it all the more of a shame that this production remains determined to squash their hopes and even their new matches. Read more... |
Violet, Music Theatre Wales/Britten-Pears Arts review - well sung and played, but to what end?Friday, 24 June 2022
Best new opera in years, they said – don’t ask who – after the Aldeburgh Festival premiere of Tom Coult’s Violet. I’d have been happy in Hackney had it been as good as, say, Philip Venables’ 4.48 Psychosis or Stuart MacRae’s The Devil Inside. Alas, nowhere near. Read more... |
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