Opera Reviews

Rigoletto, English National Opera

alexandra Coghlan Friday, 03 February 2017

This was supposed to be a triumphant return – one final encore for the production so good that audiences just couldn’t let it go. Instead, this 13^th revival of Jonathan Miller’s Mafia Rigoletto seems like an apology. The designs are handsome as ever, the concept as neat, but the details of both direction and music are so scrappy and scattered that the show feels more like a basement clear-out than a loving restoration.

Comment

The Snow Maiden, Opera North

David Nice Monday, 30 January 2017

Late January, and the soul longs for winter's end. Which is why Rimsky-Korsakov's bittersweet fairy story about the fragile daughter of Spring and Frost whose heart will melt when she discovers true love, allowing the sun to bring back warmth to earth, is so apt. Unfortunately the time of year is also one for striking singers down, so we missed two of the principals on Saturday night.

Les Enfants Terribles, Barbican

Jenny Gilbert Saturday, 28 January 2017

To judge from the hype in advance of this production, you’d think it must be a premiere. In fact Philip Glass’s dance-opera hybrid, written in 1996 and based on Jean Cocteau’s 1950 screenplay, received its first London performance at the Arcola Theatre six years ago.

Christine Rice, Julius Drake, Middle Temple Hall

David Nice Tuesday, 24 January 2017

To catch the searing desolation of a lover scorned, you need to be the complete artist, with temperament and technique in perfect equilibrium. Mezzo Christine Rice has taken us from Berlioz's Marguerite and Mozart's Donna Elvira at English National Opera via Birtwistle's Ariadne to Haydn's, and - most taxing of all - the end of an affair by telephone in Poulenc's La Voix Humaine.

Fidelio, LPO, Jurowski, RFH

alexandra Coghlan Monday, 23 January 2017

Juxtaposition is a powerful thing.

Summerfield, Jackson, Riches, Classical Opera, Page, Wigmore Hall

David Nice Wednesday, 18 January 2017

Young Amadeus is growing up in real time with MOZART 250, Classical Opera's ambitious 26-year project following its hero's creative life from childhood to the grave. 2015's start, marking two and a half centuries since the boy wonder's first visit to London, and its sequel had little to show of its main man, but plenty of other, senior composers flourishing in the same years.

La Traviata, Royal Opera

alexandra Coghlan Tuesday, 17 January 2017

It takes some pretty special casting to spice up Richard Eyre’s Royal Opera regular, currently returning for its 14th revival (with a 15th on the cards later this year). And that’s exactly what was on the bill here, with house debuts from both Joyce El-Khoury’s Violetta and Sergey Romanovsky’s Alfredo.

The Last Supper, BBCSSO, Brabbins, City Halls, Glasgow

David Kettle Monday, 16 January 2017

You can tell it’s a big deal when even a handful of London critics abandon the capital for a Saturday evening in chilly Glasgow.

Le Grand Macabre, LSO, Rattle, Barbican

David Nice Sunday, 15 January 2017

The Big Mac – as in Ligeti's music-theatre fantasia on the possible death of Death – is here to stay. Back in 1990, three critics (I was one) were invited on to the BBC World Service to say which work from the previous decade we thought would survive.

Written on Skin, Royal Opera

alexandra Coghlan Saturday, 14 January 2017

There’s a passage in Martin Crimp’s impeccable libretto for Written on Skin that describes a page of illuminated manuscript. The ink, he tells us, stays forever wet – alive with moist, fleshy, indecent human reality rather than dried into decorous fixity. As a metaphor for storytelling, it’s potent; as a description of George Benjamin’s score, it’s close to literal.