Opera Reviews

The Importance of Being Earnest, Royal Opera, Barbican

David Nice Wednesday, 30 March 2016

Some new operas worth their salt work a slow, sophisticated charm, but the handful that holler "masterpiece" grab you from the start and don't let go.

Written on Skin, Barbican

alexandra Coghlan Sunday, 20 March 2016

You learn a lot about an opera in concert. Free from directorial and design intervention, the music can and must do it all. What is good is amplified, and what’s weak exposed. When that score is as psychologically rich and texturally varied as George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, the clarity of a concert performance can actually feel like a gain rather than a loss.

Boris Godunov, Royal Opera

David Nice Tuesday, 15 March 2016

Russian bells and spinning tops dominate Richard Jones's predictably unpredictable take on Musorgsky's saga of a conscience-stricken Tsar. Latter-day purism tends to insist on the composer's seven-scene 1869 original – possibly for economic more than artistic reasons – and this two-hour-plus, interval-free whizz through seven years of Russian history is the most faithful to the first score I've heard.

Ariodante, Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

alexandra Coghlan Wednesday, 09 March 2016

The London Handel Festival is back, and instead of ploughing their usual furrow of rarely-seen works, this year’s opera is a classic. If the rest of Ariodante doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its two often-excerpted arias (“Dopo Notte” and “Scherza Infida”), then it’s still a deeply satisfying evening of music, with a large cast perfect for showing off the talents of the Royal College of Music’s student performers.

Iphigénie en Tauride, English Touring Opera

David Nice Sunday, 06 March 2016

Gluck's two operas about the daughter of Agamemnon saved from sacrifice only to serve as priestess-butcher herself have found their level on the contemporary operatic stage.

Akhnaten, English National Opera

alexandra Coghlan Saturday, 05 March 2016

What a load of balls. No, seriously. Globes, orbs, moons, suns, juggling balls, beach balls, er balls balls: if it’s spherical and pregnant with symbolism then you’re bound to find it somewhere on the props table for English National Opera’s Akhnaten. At the centre of Phelim McDermott’s new production of Philip Glass’s opera is a troupe of jugglers.

Comment

Orlando, The English Concert, Bicket, Barbican

alexandra Coghlan Wednesday, 02 March 2016

Anyone who says Handel can’t do psychology should spend an evening with Orlando. Form, orchestration, even exit conventions are all reinvented or cast aside for a work of startlingly contemporary fluidity, where music is completely the servant of drama.

Comment

Nothing, Glyndebourne Youth Opera

David Nice Saturday, 27 February 2016

Brand-new youth operas tend to fall into two types. One is hugely rewarding for the participants, a skill learned and a treasurable group experience to be remembered for the rest of their lives, as well as for their friends and family in the audience.

Il Trittico, Royal Opera

David Nice Friday, 26 February 2016

From working-class hell via convent purgatory to Florentine comic heaven, the riches of Puccini's most comprehensive masterpiece seem inexhaustible. In a production as detailed in its balance between the stylised and the seemingly spontaneous as Richard Jones's, first seen in 2011, there are always going to be new connections between the three operas to discover.

Figaro Gets a Divorce, Welsh National Opera

stephen Walsh Monday, 22 February 2016

The third of Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays, La Mère coupable, is a very different affair from the other two, in that it records actual adultery and its disastrous consequences (including Cherubino’s death in battle), as opposed to the largely comic innuendos and mistaken identities of The Barber and The Marriage.