Opera Reviews
Khovanshchina, Birmingham Opera CompanyWednesday, 23 April 2014
Has anyone ever sat through Musorgsky’s last, not quite finished, opera about the struggle for power in Moscow at the time of Peter the Great’s accession in the 1690s, and come away with the slightest idea of what it’s all about? If Khovanshchina had depended for its impact on any kind of Verdian clarity or dramaturgical shape, it would long ago have sunk without trace. Read more... |
La Traviata, Royal OperaSunday, 20 April 2014
The German soprano Diana Damrau has had the role of Violetta Valéry in La Traviata in her sights for a very long time. As she has explained in interviews, seeing the Zeffirelli film of the opera, with Teresa Stratas in the title role, as a 12-year old was a decisive moment in making her want to become a singer. That was 30 years ago. Read more... |
Powder Her Face, English National Opera, Ambika P3Thursday, 03 April 2014
The opening gyrations of Thomas Adès’s bluesy, schmoozy overture to Powder Her Face beckon you into a world of cheap sensation and excess. Accordion, saxophones and sizzle cymbal add their indecent, after-hours suggestions, and you have a microcosm in moments. Almost 20 years on from its premiere, Adès’s opera about the scandalous “Dirty Duchess” still has all the moves. Read more... |
Prince Igor, Novaya Opera, London ColiseumWednesday, 02 April 2014
Had this Moscow production any serious ideas in its head until its suddenly effective epilogue, much might have been pertinently said about an opera in which an imperialistic campaign ends in disaster, and where the Polovtsian “enemy” shows far more signs of a civilized life and wartime courtesy than the corrupt, crumbling court at home. Read more... |
L’Ormindo, Royal Opera, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseWednesday, 26 March 2014
The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the new indoor Jacobean theatre at The Globe, is an absolute jewel of painstaking historical research and craftsmanship. It is small, seating around 350, and with its thrust stage lit by around 100 candles (with electric light only on the musicians’ gallery in this performance), it is a challenging space to put on an opera, but also a uniquely atmospheric one. Read more... |
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal OperaSaturday, 15 March 2014
The big message of The Woman Without a Shadow, brushing aside the narrower, moral majority preaching that you’re incomplete without children, seems clear: fulfillment can’t be bought at the cost of another’s suffering. Yet the path towards that realization in this "massive and artificial fairy-tale", as an increasingly alienated Richard Strauss called it, is strewn with magnificent thorns in both his complex, layered music and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s elaborate symbolic libretto. Read more... |
Le docteur Miracle, Pop-up Opera, The Running HorseTuesday, 11 March 2014
An orchestral musician recently told me that only one per cent of graduates from UK music colleges go on to take up a post in an established opera company or orchestra. You’d think, given such an alarming statistic, that there would be a lot of very good voices floating around trying to drum up work. Young talent is enterprisingly putting itself out there in a new wave of pub or site-specific fringe performances. Read more... |
La Fille du régiment, Royal OperaTuesday, 04 March 2014
Roll up, roll up, to hear Juan Diego Flórez deliver his nine cheek-by-jowl top Cs in the umpteenth performance of Laurent Pelly’s slick, often funny Donizetti comedy. Does the whole thing still fizz? Only up to a point in Christian Räth's revival. Yet I’d still rather see this – or Don Pasquale, or L’elisir d’amore – any number of times than endure any more of the composer’s “unjustly neglected” tinpot tragedies. Read more... |
Rodelinda, English National OperaSaturday, 01 March 2014
If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves. Read more... |
Boulevard Solitude, Welsh National OperaThursday, 27 February 2014
Reviewing WNO’s Manon Lescaut a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that its director, Mariusz Treliński, had devised the production in terms of Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, “and simply tyre-levered the Puccini into it.” QED. Here are the same railway station, the same trains flashing by, the same barman, the same slinky, raincoated – or less – Manons (plural), the same general air of transient sleaze. Boris Kudlička’s designs have changed in detail but not in essence. Read more... |
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