Opera
igor.toronyilalic
It has always been a cornerstone of my personal philosophy that beauty and insight can be found in the very lowest of common denominators. That Big Brother, Friends, Love It magazine or Paris Hilton provide revelations about life that are of as much consequence, of as much wonder, as any offered up by the classic pantheon. That that which the people respond to must and usually does have plenty of merit lurking within it. And so I have always held out hope that Philip Glass, the most popular of living classical composers, is actually quite good, somehow, somewhere. But, actually, he really isn Read more ...
David Nice
Marie Duplessis, Alexandre Dumas the Younger's real-life "lady of the camellias", was only 23 when consumption finally claimed her. Ignore a few lines about youth in Verdi's operatic treatment, though, and there's no reason why courtesan Violetta shouldn't be a woman of advancing years who finds true love with a man half her age or more; think Chéri (Colette's novel, not the film if you please). Yet the real prompting for that stalwart of the London amateur and semi-professional music scene Chelsea Opera Group to choose Romanian-born diva Nelly Miricioiu as its traviata in concert was because Read more ...
David Nice
The redoubtable and always stylish Russian mezzo-soprano Irina Arkhipova, who died a week ago at the age of 85, still has a song to sing about the prolonged winter we're enduring. Among many roles in which she plunged in true Slavic fashion to contralto depths was that of the shepherd-boy Lel in Rimsky-Korsakov's Snegurochka (The Snow Maiden). This "Spring fairy-tale" is about how we're destined to carry on shivering until the Snow Maiden, daughter of Frost and Spring, melts at the first rays of love. Here's Arkhipova in a fine old Melodiya recording of Lel's first song, wondering whether the Read more ...
josh.spero
Let’s get the obvious one out of the way first: if a law firm is going to put on an opera, it should probably be Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial by Jury. Instead, having progressed through G&S’s Mikado and Pirates of Penzance in previous years, Magic Circle firm Allen & Overy last weekend staged The Magic Flute, and not just anywhere, but at Glyndebourne. The house which has resounded to Peter Pears and Felicity Lott this time was filled by tax lawyers and legal secretaries.It has no shortage of talent behind (and in front of) it. The director was Andrew Leveson, who has worked at Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It takes roughly, ooh, about five minutes for Jonathan Miller's new production of Donizetti's The Elixir of Love (whose 1950s set had the audience gawping smilingly within seconds) to start electrifying the nerve-endings into orgasmic spasm. With one sexy shake of her hips, Sarah Tynan's immeasurably winning blonde-bobbed Adina, a Marilyn Monroe-like tease, the till-girl and owner of a Midwest diner and filling station, which rotates - almost as stunningly as Tynan - amid the nothingness of desert and sky, clutches a mop and swings this music and its troop of jiving dotted quavers into a Read more ...
David Nice
Fasten your seatbelts; it's a bumpy ride to the casino. In Prokofiev's wilful but uncompromising take on Dostoyevsky's tale of obsession, all the private paths of love, lust and greed lead to the gambling tables - eventually. The composer saves up one of the most adrenalin-charged scenes in 20th-century opera for the last act, giving director and conductor some headaches in generating interest and comprehensibility along the way. With a dedication we can only imagine, Richard Jones and Antonio Pappano have solved Prokofiev the chess master's conundrum better than in any previous production I' Read more ...
graham.rickson
The plot of this rarely performed Gilbert and Sullivan spoof melodrama is gloriously amusing. The male heirs of the Murgatroyd family suffer under a witch’s curse which forces them to commit a crime each day, or suffer an agonising death. Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd has fled the ancestral home and now lives under a pseudonym, meaning that his younger brother Despard has had to assume both the baronetcy and the duty to commit the daily crime. Unlike his older brother's dastardly penchant for stealing babies and robbing banks, he finds it hard to progress beyond forging cheques and fiddling expenses Read more ...
David Nice
Is Donizetti's fustian operatic mash-up of Sir Walter Scott worth staging seriously? On CD, stupenda Sutherland and divina Callas continue to give us goosebumps with their darting, florid stabs at poor mad Lucia. If the difficult-to-achieve match of bel canto and dramatic intensity rests only with the lead tenor, as it did last night, what's left? Well, this revival of David Alden's 2008 production still looks stunning, well in line with ENO's high visual style so far this season. The expressionist mania bursting out of those sets and costumes, though, can't often be supported by a Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Two very different lessons on love this week. From the Aphrodite-like Joyce DiDonato at the Wigmore Hall, there emerged a correct, wise, honest way to achieve an enamoured state; from the familiarly fickle cast of Così fan tutte - an almost unwatchably faulty bunch of emotional primitives in Jonathan Miller's production for the Royal Opera - very much the wrong way.Miller is absolutely right to press home the point about the unattractiveness of Così fan tutte's group of solipsists. A mirror is the star of the show as a result. No one can escape it. Fiordiligi (Sally Matthews) falls for Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The BBC launched today its own popular opera talent hunt (details below), while ITV's Popstar to Operastar has suffered heavy critical attack and disappointing public ratings. The BBC's Commissioning Editor for Music and Events, Jan Younghusband, added a private comment to our review of the ITV show here, pointing out: "My big struggle is how we bring this great entertainment [opera] to TV in a meaningful way without wrecking it."The BBC's Passion for Opera plans in brief:Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Rolando Villazón and Danielle de Niese present specially commissioned films for BBC Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Glyndebourne Opera's headline news this summer is its first-ever production of Britten's Billy Budd, to be directed by Donmar Warehouse director Michael Grandage in his own first venture into opera. A new Don Giovanni with Gerald Finley and a revival of the historic 1975 David Hockney Rake's Progress accompany listings of previous Festival productions of Macbeth, Cosi fan tutte and Hänsel und Gretel. Billy Budd (Britten) 23, 26, 29 May, 2, 5, 8, 11, 16, 19, 22, 27 JuneGlyndebourne’s first staging of the all-male opera of 1951, directed by Donmar Warehouse’s Michael Grandage in his opera Read more ...
David Nice
Two hundred costumes, over 60 solo roles and the world premiere of a great operatic composer's first thoughts: it's a task which would daunt the best-resourced opera company in the world. The fact that Prokofiev's initial, 11-scene meditation on Tolstoy's War and Peace was launched last night by students with slow-burn but ultimately total confidence, an orchestral collaboration with established professionals and a fusion of production with design at the very highest level could only send us out in to the streets of Glasgow echoing the Russian soldiers' final cries of "Ura!"The most Read more ...