Opera Reviews
Mamzer Bastard, Royal Opera, Hackney Empire review - inert Hasidic music-dramaFriday, 15 June 2018
Striking it lucky with a successful new opera is a rare occurrence, though every company has a duty to keep on trying. Read more...
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Acis and Galatea, English National Opera, Lilian Baylis House review - Handel for the hashtag generationTuesday, 12 June 2018
If you go to ENO’s Acis and Galatea expecting a grassy knoll draped decoratively with a Watteau shepherdess or two then you may be disappointed. Read more... |
Roscoe, BBC Philharmonic, Mena, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - a scenic send-offTuesday, 12 June 2018
Juanjo Mena, chief conductor of Manchester's BBC Philharmonic for the past seven years, took his official leave of them with a programme reflecting his great love, the music of his Spanish homeland. Read more... |
Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne review - no weak linkMonday, 11 June 2018
What a great show, on every level. David McVicar’s Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, originally staged in 2005, and in its third revival this year, has a cast without a weak link, and never fails to draw in the audience to the work’s cycles of power, suffering, death and intermittent triumph... Read more... |
Un ballo in maschera, Grange Park Opera review – singing out against the American grainMonday, 11 June 2018
Stumble across Grange Park Opera’s new brick-clad “Theatre in the Woods”, nestled amid a labyrinth of gardens and orchards next to the rambling Tudor pile of West Horsley Place in Surrey, and on a mild June evening you may feel as if you have fallen into some Home Counties version of a magic-realist novel. Read more... |
Lohengrin, Royal Opera review - swan mystery musically illuminatedFriday, 08 June 2018
It's awfully long for a fairytale in which a mystery prince helps a damsel in distress, and she asks him the question she shouldn't. Myth tends to go deeper, as Wagner did in The Ring of the Nibelung after Lohengrin. Here he captures the magic of transformation and transcendence, but in between there's too much hard-to-stage pomp. Read more... |
La finta semplice, Classical Opera, QEH review - consummate musicianship stokes early MozartThursday, 07 June 2018
You can always be sure of impeccable casting and spirited playing as Ian Page takes his Classical Opera through Mozart year by year. Just don't expect more than the glimmer of genius to come in 1768, though. Read more... |
Der fliegende Holländer, Longborough Festival review - stand and deliver on an empty stageThursday, 07 June 2018
Brilliant and innovative though it is in many respects, The Flying Dutchman is by no means a straightforward piece to stage. It’s an odd, sometimes uncomfortable mixture of the genre and the epic. At Sadler’s Wells in the sixties they had a little ship and a big ship that hove into view, a fishing village, sailors with tankards and striped shirts, and girls at looms. Read more... |
Capriccio, Garsington Opera review - a classy evening with words and musicMonday, 04 June 2018
Like the comedies of Mozart – the genius the artistic milieu depicted in Capriccio seems to be waiting for, if its original 1770s setting is observed – the more conversational operas of Richard Strauss depend far more than one often realises on conducting that sets a stylish, buoyant pace. Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Opera Holland Park review - the pain behind the prettinessSaturday, 02 June 2018
A proper production of Così fan tutte should make you feel as if the script for a barrel-scraping Carry On film has been hi-jacked by Shakespeare and Chekhov – working as a team. The story is so silly (even nasty), the music so sublime. Read more... |
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