mon 22/09/2025

Opera Reviews

Madama Butterfly, Royal Opera

David Nice

"È un'immensa pietà" - "it's heartbreaking," rather than "it's a huge pity" - sings consul Sharpless of "Butterfly" Cio-Cio San's fatal belief that her American husband will return to her.

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Alceste, Early Opera Company, Curnyn, Wigmore Hall

David Nice

A wife dies to save her husband; a hero goes to hell and back to retrieve her from the underworld.

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Ormisda, St George's Hanover Square

alexandra Coghlan

The annual London Handel Festival is dutifully working its way through every one of Handel’s operas in a cycle that will eventually take us from Alcina to Xerxes before, presumably, starting all over again.

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The First Commandment, Classical Opera, St John’s Smith Square

Peter Quantrill

Isn’t it funny? You wait ages for an opera by an eleven-year-old and then two turn up at once. The world’s feature journalists descended on Vienna at Christmas for a new take on Cinderella by Alma Deutscher. What they heard, for what it’s worth, was a precocious, glittery pastiche of Classical manners. Last night was the real deal.

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Partenope, English National Opera

David Nice

It's time again for surrealist charades at the nothing-doing mansion. Christopher Alden's Handel is back at ENO, making inconsequentiality seem wondrous.

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Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Royal Opera

David Nice

Recent British-based productions have taken Wagner's paean to creativity, the reconciliation of tradition and the individual talent, at face value.

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The Winter's Tale, English National Opera

David Nice

After a Royal Opera performance of Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a friend spotted Hans Werner Henze in the foyer and had the temerity to ask that annoying question "What did you think?" "Very competent and extremely well performed," came the reply.

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Hansel and Gretel, Opera North

graham Rickson

Opera North’s updated version of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel takes place in what looks like a down-at-heel Leeds housing estate, the titular siblings shown filming the story using simple domestic props and back projections. Quite how the impoverished pair have acquired a high-end video camera isn’t made clear; presumably the assorted boxes of Christmas decorations scattered around Giles Cadel’s spare set fell off the back of the same lorry.

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Juan Diego Flórez, Vincenzo Scalera, Symphony Hall, Birmingham

Richard Bratby

“Who says Mozart is not like Rossini?” remarked Juan Diego Flórez, about a quarter of an hour into his debut recital at Symphony Hall.

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Le Vin herbé, Welsh National Opera

stephen Walsh

Wagner’s Tristan left a huge mark on fin de siècle art, on the symbolist poets, even on their pseudonyms; Debussy himself toyed with a four-act opera on the subject.

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