Opera
The Makropulos Affair, Welsh National Opera review - complexity realised brilliantly on the stageSaturday, 17 September 2022
What, anyway, is The Makropulos Case all about? Is it simply about the horrors of unnatural longevity; or does it expose the limitations of the rational mind confronted by the irrational; is it about love of a distorted ideal, like some updated... Read more... |
La rondine, If Opera review - a bold opening gambit from a company changing the business of operaSaturday, 27 August 2022
Covid has been devastating for all the arts, but especially opera – the riskiest and most expensive gamble of the lot. And it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near done yet. On one memorable night this summer the number of covers stepping into principal... Read more... |
Saul, The English Concert, Butt, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - properly exciting music dramaFriday, 26 August 2022
It’s not an opera, of course, but of all Handel’s oratorios, Saul is probably the one that is best suited to being presented as an actual drama. Several productions, most notably Barrie Kosky's at Glyndebourne, have shown how it can work on stage,... Read more... |
Patience, Charles Court Opera, Wilton's Music Hall review - bar room blissThursday, 25 August 2022
“Twenty lovesick maidens we,” pining in stained-glass attitudes for florid poet Reginald Bunthorne, usually kick off Gilbert and Sullivan’s delicious mockery of the high (or cod) aesthetical. That might have been a problem for Charles Court Opera’s... Read more... |
Sir John in Love, British Youth Opera review - a delicious end-of-summer treatThursday, 25 August 2022
You’d be forgiven for forgetting that 2022 marks a rather significant classical milestone. Vaughan Williams’ 150th anniversary has scarcely troubled the Proms season beyond the odd symphony, and while most orchestras are doing their bit in the... Read more... |
First Persons: Glyndebourne's sustainability advisers Sara and Jeremy Eppel on creating eco-friendly operaTuesday, 23 August 2022
Like the beacons saving ships from the Cornish rocks in Ethel Smyth’s opera, The Wreckers, which opened this year’s Glyndebourne Festival, the Sussex opera house has itself become a beacon of more environmentally sustainable opera. In 2021, with the... Read more... |
First Person: Michael Volpe on the utopian thinking behind his new If Opera companySaturday, 20 August 2022
“But what’s in it for you?”. It was a simple enough question, asked by an accomplished opera singer. It stemmed from hearing that the new version of the Iford Arts opera company I was running was aiming for a different kind of guiding philosophy: it... Read more... |
Salome, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Gardner, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - orchestral majesty triumphsWednesday, 17 August 2022
It is quite some years, if not decades, since the Edinburgh International Festival had any claim to be a festival of staged opera. This year we have had just one – Garsington Opera’s bewitching Rusalka – surrounded by a handful of concert... Read more... |
La Voix humaine/Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Glyndebourne review - phantasmagorical wondersMonday, 15 August 2022
“Variety is the spice of life! Vive la difference!,” chirrups the ensemble at the end of this giddying double bill. And there could hardly be more singular variety acts than a potential suicide at the end of a phone line, a woman who lets her... Read more... |
Rusalka, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - sumptuous rendition of a watery fableThursday, 11 August 2022
The last-minute indisposition of your leading lady is enough to give festival directors palpitations, let alone their audiences, now forewarned by the dreaded email thudding into inboxes. And so it was that Andrew Moore, Head of Music at the... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Bayreuth Festival Ring 2022 - a jumbled mess of ideas, some of them compellingTuesday, 09 August 2022
It is mid-way through the new Ring cycle, and we are taking lunch outside the old town hall on the high street in Bayreuth. Discussion at neighbouring tables is intense: “The Ring is a child!”, “Why does Wotan have no spear?”, “The pyramid in the... Read more... |
Utopia, Limited, National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company review - bounded raptureMonday, 08 August 2022
Joseph Heller grew tired of being told that he’d never written anything as good as Catch 22. ‘Who has?’, he'd retort. In the same spirit, it’s futile to compare Gilbert and Sullivan’s late flop Utopia, Limited to The Mikado, The Gondoliers,... Read more... |
