Opera Reviews
Zingari/Tosca Suite, Opera Rara, Rizzi, Cadogan Hall review - symphonic mastery and fluent hokumSaturday, 04 December 2021
Two major composers took Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies as the subject for two very different operas. The 19 year old Rachmaninov in 1892 had inspiration but not much sense of dramatic continuity; Leoncavallo in 1912, 20 years on from his deserved smash hit Pagliacci, managed the flow but not the inspiration. Read more...
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The Valkyrie, English National Opera review - fitfully flickering flamesSaturday, 20 November 2021
That the ever-decreasing circles of Richard Jones’s first Wagner Ring instalment for English National Opera ended in a no-show for the fire that should have made former Valkyrie supreme Brünnhilde proof against all but a fearless hero – Westminster City Council poured cold water on it before this first night – is in a way the least of it. Read more... |
The Cunning Little Vixen, CBSO, Gražinytė-Tyla, Symphony Hall Birmingham review - nature, large as lifeThursday, 18 November 2021
"Nature is healing," declared the social media meme, back in the early days of lockdown when humanity had temporarily retreated to focus on its banana bread. There were pictures to prove it, apparently. Dolphins sported in the canals of Venice; city gardens filled with newly emboldened songbirds. Didn’t a herd of goats colonise Llandudno at one point? Something like that, anyway. Read more... |
Macbeth, Royal Opera review - bloody, bold, and resoluteWednesday, 17 November 2021
Phyllida Lloyd’s production of Macbeth has been in rep at the Royal Opera since 2002, and it is a solid performer. The setting is slick and vaguely period, with lots of iron weaponry, smart, pony-tailed warriors, but not a kilt in sight. Read more... |
Siegfried, RINGafa, St Mary’s Putney review - heroes everywhereTuesday, 16 November 2021
A Samoan-themed Ring cycle? Well, why not? A calculated distance has always separated its audience from the Norse and German epics of its origin. Read more... |
Carmen, Opera North review - humanity and no bullThursday, 11 November 2021
Is Bizet’s Carmen all about Carmen? Or Don José and his obsession with her? Or the society that made her what she is? Or all of the above? Inevitably it’s an opera that almost never escapes some Regietheater treatment these days. Director Edward Dick’s take on it is definitely one of those, and tries to tackle as many of the issues as it can. Read more... |
Bluebeard's Castle 1: Bullock, Finley, Theatre of Sound, Stone Nest review - scenes from a marriageMonday, 08 November 2021
Which is the locked-in character of the two in Bluebeard’s Castle? In composing his one-act masterpiece of shattering profundity, composer Bartók clearly intended Bluebeard’s as “the tragedy of a soul destined to be alone”; the woman Judith unlocks five doors to his psyche, but two more doors must be left shut. Read more... |
Bluebeard’s Castle 2: Komlósi, Relyea, LPO, Gardner, RFH review - consolations of solitudeMonday, 08 November 2021
Where is the stage – outside or within? The question posed by the prologue of Bartók’s only opera addresses the fundamental privacy of our thoughts, as well as setting the scene for its drama within the theatre of our own minds. For many of us a year and a half of periodic lockdown has only turned up the volume on the echoing contents of our heads, lending an unlooked-for familiarity to Bluebeard’s forbidding castle. Read more... |
HMS Pinafore, English National Opera review - shipshape classic comedy craftSaturday, 30 October 2021
Yes, it was bound to be HMS Laugh-a-minute, given Cal “One Man, Two Guvnors” McCrystal’s ENO comedy riffs on an already funny early G&S classic, but what does this tight little craft have to say to Little England today? Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, Glyndebourne Tour - a classic revitalizedMonday, 25 October 2021
Tom Rakewell Esquire, the Glyndebourne edition generally known as “the Hockney Rake” though it is very much director John Cox’s too, is 46 years old. Read more... |
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