Opera Reviews
Owen Wingrave, RNCM, Manchester review - battle of a pacifistWednesday, 02 April 2025
It’s quite ironic that the Royal Northern College of Music should have invited, as director of this, Britten’s avowedly pacifist opera, Orpha Phelan – whose version of his Billy Budd for Opera North nearly 10 years ago contained one of the most thrilling battle scenes ever staged. Read more... |
La finta giardiniera, The Mozartists, Cadogan Hall review - blooms in the wild gardenWednesday, 26 March 2025
Just now, the notion of a long-term project that concludes in 2041 sounds like an optimistic bet on the far future worthy of some 18th-century Enlightenment philosophe – Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, maybe. The musicians of The Mozartists are clearly hoping for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as their MOZART250 programme ambitiously tracks, in annual increments, the music that Wolfgang Amadeus wrote exactly 250 years ago. Read more... |
Der fliegende Holländer, Irish National Opera review - sailing to nowhereMonday, 24 March 2025
So much looked promising for Irish National Opera’s first Wagner: the casting, certainly, the conductor – Music Director Fergus Sheil knows and loves this music – and the venue (the Libeskind-designed Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, proven ideal for Richard Strauss). How could a production go wrong with such a theatrical romantic tale, a pioneering music-drama for its time (1843)? All too easily, it seems, by either coming up with inappropriate business or letting the singers stand and deliver. Read more... |
Die Zauberflöte, Royal Academy of Music review - first-rate youth makes for a moving experienceFriday, 21 March 2025
Tamino in the operating theatre hallucinating serpents? Sarastro’s acolytes wheeling lit-up plasma packs? From the central part of the Overture onwards – just when we thought we'd escape directorial intervention in Olivia Clarke’s racy conducting - Jamie Manton’s production of Mozart's adult fairy-tale looks distinctly unpromising. But by Act Two, it becomes one of the most moving Magic Flutes I’ve ever seen. Glorious singing and youthful energy help to make it so. Read more... |
Mansfield Park, Guildhall School review - fun when frothy, chugging in romantic entanglementsTuesday, 04 March 2025
Let’s call it Jane Austen fit for the West End, but with opera singers. The fact that it also serves as a fun ensemble piece for students is also very much in favour of Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park, with a neatly telescoped and often witty libretto by Alasdair Middleton. Like his latest work, Uprising, a community opera for Glyndebourne staged at the weekend, it presses all the right buttons for the young, while staying within safe and mostly derivative boundaries. Read more... |
Uprising, Glyndebourne review - didactic community opera superbly performedSunday, 02 March 2025
The score is effective, and rewarding to perform, but derivative. The libretto uses every cliché, or truism, about save-the-planet youth activism in the book; it’s didactic, not dramatic. Direction, design and lighting sometimes feel unfinished. Yet as a youth/community opera, Glyndebourne’s latest educational project hits the mark; the commitment of singers and players young and old, professional and amateur, makes the ends justify the means. Read more... |
Help to give theartsdesk a future!Saturday, 01 March 2025
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com. It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic team of arts and culture writers went ahead with an ambitious plan – to launch a dedicated internet site devoted to coverage of the UK arts scene. Read more... |
Fledermaus, Irish National Opera review - sex, please, we're Viennese/American/Russian/IrishMonday, 24 February 2025
Let’s finally face the elephant in the room: the most popular Viennese operetta, packed with hit numbers, no longer works on the stage as a whole. The central party, yes, never more high-energy delight than here, with a cast of 13 and 10 instrumentalists on stage. As for the rest, not even the likes of Richard Jones, Harry Kupfer and Christopher Alden have won a total victory. Davey Kelleher comes closer, but the high jinks can still be wearing in the outer acts. Read more... |
The Capulets and the Montagues, English Touring Opera review - the wise guys are singing like canariesMonday, 24 February 2025
A year ago, after a deeply disappointing Manon Lescaut at Hackney Empire, I wrote here that English Touring Opera had often excelled in the past, and would do so again. The company hasn’t taken long to prove the point. Read more... |
Mary, Queen of Scots, English National Opera review - heroic effort for an overcooked history lessonMonday, 17 February 2025
Genius doesn't always tally with equal opportunities, to paraphrase Doris Lessing. Opera houses have a duty to put on new works by women composers; sometimes an instant classic emerges. But to revive a music drama that hardly made waves back in 1977? Thea Musgrave’s Mary, Queen of Scots has some strong invention, and whizzes you through historical bullet points so quickly that there’s no chance to get bored. But does it deserve a company giving it their all? Read more... |
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