Opera Reviews
Metropolitan Opera At-Home Gala livestream review - classy joy and sorrow in domestic settingsMonday, 27 April 2020
So many of the world's great opera singers inviting us to look through the keyhole at a carefully presented version of their lockdown lives over four very variable hours, such bad sound for the most part (Skype, like Zoom, catches the voice but loses the accompaniment). Read more... |
Elektra/Der Rosenkavalier, Nightly Met Opera Streams review - searing hits and indulgent missesWednesday, 22 April 2020
A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, Complicité online review - well-projected journey from pastoral to madhouseWednesday, 08 April 2020
One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration with W H Auden and Chester Kallman is as a numbers opera in nine pictures, four of them indebted to Hogarth's series of paintings/prints. Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Opera North, OperaVision review - claustrophobic visions of terror and beautyFriday, 03 April 2020
Feeling stir-crazy right now? Imagine being confined to one room with a half-crazed housekeeper, two dysfunctional kids and two increasingly insistent ghosts, plagued by nightmares, unable even to get out into the garden or walk down to the lake. Read more... |
Le nozze di Figaro, Garsington Opera, OperaVision review - natural comedy, musical sublimityMonday, 30 March 2020
Only the birds will be singing at country opera houses around the UK this summer. Glyndebourne seems over-optimistic in declaring that it might be able to launch in July; other companies with shorter seasons have made the regretful but right decisions to call it a year. Read more... |
The Marriage of Figaro, English National Opera review - energised attitudes, lower-level humanismMonday, 16 March 2020
So Susanna and Figaro got married on Saturday, just before the entire Almaviva household and its home, the London Coliseum, went into quarantine. Read more... |
Susanna, Royal Opera/London Handel Festival review - fitful shiningsThursday, 12 March 2020
That virtue can be fascinating and prayers to a just God dramatic have been proved in riveting productions of two late Handel oratorios, Theodora and Jephtha. Read more... |
Fidelio, Royal Opera review - fitfully vivid singing in a dramatic voidMonday, 02 March 2020
Emblazoned on a drop-curtain in front of a mirror-image of the auditorium, the three great tenets of the French revolution seem to be mocking us right at the start, above all the second of them: equality, really, given the make-up of the Royal Opera stalls? Read more... |
Cosi fan tutte, English Touring Opera review - a blissful, uncomplicated delightMonday, 02 March 2020
Cosi fan tutte is, as the opera’s subtitle clearly tells us, “A School for Lovers”. But too often these days it can feel like a school for the audience. Joyless productions lecture us sternly on the battle of the sexes – on chauvinism, feminism, cynicism and sex – until we’re battered into fashionable discomfort. A happy ending? Read more... |
Nixon in China, Scottish Opera - musical chatter, poetic banalitySaturday, 29 February 2020
Scotland was at the cutting edge of culture in 1988, when the Edinburgh International Festival hosted the UK premiere of Nixon in China in the Houston Grand Opera production at the cavernous Playhouse. Read more... |
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