Opera Reviews
Orlando, Welsh National OperaMonday, 28 September 2015
It’s almost impossible to imagine what a Handel opera performance can have been like in London in the 1730s, when Orlando first appeared. The audience came primarily to hear their favourite singers: and these must have been sensational, if not unduly dedicated to the dramatic verities they were supposed to be representing: castrati like Senesino and Farinelli, sopranos like Cuzzoni and Faustina (who once came to blows onstage, presumably trying to upstage one another). Read more... |
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, English National OperaSunday, 27 September 2015
“The music quacks, hoots, pants and gasps”: whichever of his Pravda scribes Stalin commandeered to demolish Shostakovich’s “tragedy-satire” in January 1936, two years into its wildly successful stage history, didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it defines one extreme of the ENO Orchestra’s stupendous playing under its new Music Director Mark Wigglesworth. On the other hand there are also heartbreaking tenderness, terrifying whispers and aching sensuousness. Read more... |
Lost In Thought: A Mindfulness Opera, Mahogany Opera Group, LSO St Luke'sSaturday, 26 September 2015
Was it when we all obediently received, then held, contemplated, then savoured, then (and only then) swallowed a single grape? Or was it as we paced solemnly round the room for the sixth time, whirling brightly coloured plastic tubing above our heads to make a whirring sound, that the penny dropped? Actually I’m fairly certain it was being exhorted, for the nth time, to “embody alertness”, to feel my “super-alert hands” that did it for me. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Conductor Mark WigglesworthWednesday, 23 September 2015
Mark Wigglesworth and I go back quite a long way in terms of meetings – namely to 1996, when I interviewed him for Gramophone about the launch of his Shostakovich symphonies cycle on BIS. He completed it a decade later, though that release hung fire until last year. Read more... |
Hofmann, Royal Danish Orchestra, Boder, Symphony Hall, BirminghamThursday, 17 September 2015
There’s just something about an opera orchestra when it’s let out of the pit. The Royal Danish Orchestra is more than that, of course – it makes much of its six centuries of history, and since its past members included John Dowland, Heinrich Schütz and Carl Nielsen, why wouldn’t it? Read more... |
Trofonio’s Cave, Bampton OperaWednesday, 16 September 2015
Antonio Salieri. Mozart’s nemesis – wrong. Beethoven’s teacher – right. Unjustly neglected in his own right – maybe. Bampton Opera have put some flesh on the bones of his reputation with an English-language production of La grotto di Trifonio, first performed in Vienna, October 1785. They have done Salieri proud: we can see for ourselves why he is who he is. Read more... |
Orphée et Eurydice, Royal OperaTuesday, 15 September 2015
The tale of Orpheus – a musician so talented his art could overturn the laws of the universe – is the originary myth of opera itself. Is it any wonder, then, that it’s a story that the genre continues to tell and retell with such care and fascination? Read more... |
I Puritani, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 12 September 2015
Whatever one may feel about Bellini’s music, it’s hard to think of him as in any sense a political composer. So you could almost hear the hearts hit the floor when the curtain went up – or rather was as usual already up – on the opening of Bellini’s Puritani with Orangemen and a scruffy Catholic Arturo instead of good old Roundheads and Cavaliers. Read more... |
The Magic Flute, Komische Oper Berlin, Edinburgh Festival TheatreSaturday, 29 August 2015
In 2007, a tiny British theatre company called 1927 staged their first ever show at the Edinburgh Fringe – the darkly reimagined collection of fairytales and fables Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. Now, almost a decade on, they are back where it all began – not at the Fringe but the Edinburgh International Festival, with their acclaimed Komische Oper production of The Magic Flute. Read more... |
Entanglement/ That Man Stephen Ward, Presteigne FestivalFriday, 28 August 2015
Two dramas of sex, sleaze and death in the postwar London underworld: to outsiders, this double bill of chamber operas by Charlotte Bray and Thomas Hyde might look like an unlikely opening night for the annual Presteigne Festival. That would be to overlook the artistic direction of George Vass, whose commitment to new music has made this short, spirited festival just a couple of valleys over from Hay-on-Wye a chamber-sized successor-in-spirit to Cheltenham. Read more... |
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