Opera
David Nice
It may not have been the best year for eye-popping productions; even visionary director Richard Jones fell a bit short with a tame-ish Royal Opera Bohème, though his non-operatic The Twilight Zone is something else. Instead there's been time to reflect on what makes a true company. While English National Opera, after the end of Mark Wigglesworth's short but unsurpassable tenure, showed what a shortened season looks like – the London Coliseum no longer "the home of ENO", Bat out of Hell taking over from June to August – others continued to blaze a trail forward.Top prize for showing Read more ...
David Nice
Remastered they may be, but the 20 live operas recorded here between 1949 and 1964 vary soundwise from clean at best to atrocious, with all the caprices of stage noise and audience participation seemingly acceptable at the time (so often there's the shouting prompter who seems duty bound to cue everything – even interjecting a loud libiamo! in the silence before the voices kick in for La traviata's Brindisi). But you don't have to be a diehard Callas fanatic to realise the value of this extraordinary treasury. On stage she always gave that little bit extra, complete with sobs in the Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music’s production of Massenet’s Cendrillon has a particularly strong professional production team, and it shows. This is one of the most attractively spectacular operas the college has mounted for years.Director Olivia Fuchs and designer Yannis Thavoris stage the story in Versailles (the Hall of Mirrors, in particular) in the era of Louis XIV, and the set makes a wall of two-way mirrors its abiding theme, providing not only for impressive visual effects but also an easy and symbolic transition from the home of Cendrillon and her nasty step-mother and sisters to Read more ...
David Nice
Are "Cav and Pag" inseparable? Clearly not, to judge from Opera North's "Little Greats" and elsewhere, but it's still the pairing of choice. Tricky, because as music-theatre, Leoncavallo's drama of rough life entwined with rough art stands high above Mascagni's Sicilian village shenanigans, despite great scenes and numbers in both. Director Damiano Michieletto, with his more than superficial connections between the two, has already been praised for solving some of the disparities (not least the fact that Cavalleria Rusticana takes a good quarter of an hour to get started). In this Royal Opera Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A comma divides the title of this opera double-bill in two, but the works paired here (Michael Nyman’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Kate Whitley’s Unknown Position) each explore what happens when you take it away – when natural divisions, between human and object, self and other, perception and reality are dissolved, dismantled or elided. It’s an interesting premise, but one that only translates here into a single interesting opera.A bit of a buzz is building around young British composer Kate Whitley. A recent NMC release of her works gives a taste of a musician with a Read more ...
David Nice
It was excellent, flesh-creepy fun back in 1978, when a young Simon Rattle conducted the Liverpool world premiere with the composer declaiming, but how well has Austrian maverick H(einz) K(arl) "Nali" Gruber's "pandemonium" for chansonnier and orchestra Frankenstein!! stood the test of time? One word: brilliantly. In the hands of the master, who not only conducted its bewitching chamber version but also kazooed, crooned, falsettoed and shouted his way through his absurdist fellow Vienneser H.C. Artmann's contemporary children's rhymes, its performance as a centrepiece of the Royal Stockholm Read more ...
David Nice
Even seemingly immortal singers grow old. Sir Bryn is closer to the "Martinmas summer" of Shakespeare's and Verdi's Sir John than when first he put on the fat suit at the Royal Opera 18 years ago. Even if he walks the gouty walk that matches the belly, vocally he seems richer than ever. Maybe not quite the definitive operatic Falstaff of our era - that honour falls to Ambrogio Maestri - but a suitable planet for the variable young moons of Liverpool's European Opera Centre to revolve around, at least two of them shining bright. With the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra very much present Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Go west, opera-lover: Mid Wales Opera is back in business. In fact, it’s been back since spring this year, when it toured venues in Wales and England with a warmly reviewed Handel Semele and a striking (and impressively cast) Magic Flute inspired by 1970s British sci-fi. That was the first production under the company’s new artistic leadership of Jonathan Lyness and Richard Studer – a conductor/director team with considerable form and substantial ambitions. This spirited chamber staging of Walton’s 1967 “extravaganza in one act” The Bear – MWO’s third new production this year – is modest in Read more ...
David Nice
A certain online scandalmonger and coffin-chaser likes to preface news of deaths in the musical world with "sadness" or "tragedy", usually when neither he nor we have heard of the person in question. But the end of Dmitri Hvorostovsky's two-and-a-half-year struggle with brain cancer really does make opera-lovers very sad indeed – not just because he was only 55, but also because one of the world's most beautiful lyric baritone voices still had much more to give. As with most great artists, though, he has left us a legacy on film and CD which guarantees him a certain immortality.Soul and Read more ...
David Nice
If you're not going to mention the imaginative genius of Stravinsky, Auden and Kallman within the covers of your programme, and the only article, by the director, is titled "Acting Naturally", then the production had better deliver. That remarkable actor Selina Cadell's eloquent words, both there and in a "First Person" piece on theartsdesk, promise more than actually emerges in a debut staging from the lavishly-supported OperaGlass Works which doesn't even have the curiosity value of going daringly wrong. Between them Cadell and her curiously un-buoyant conductor, Laurence Cummings, much Read more ...
william.ward
It has long been a mystery why no new production of Semiramide should have been staged at Covent Garden since 1887: un offesa terribile considering that this splendid melodramma tragico should have been the inaugural production of the Royal Italian Opera House (our current theatre’s predecessor) in 1847.In fact much of Rossini’s repertoire, both comic and tragic, fell out of favour worldwide from about the time of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, partly as a disappearance of such star lead sopranos such as Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba. So with the exception of a couple of propaganda-driven Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The great and good of the London music scene were gathered at English National Opera last night for the unveiling of American Wunderkind Nico Muhly’s new opera, Marnie. Although it was commissioned by the Met in New York, somehow ENO managed to wangle the world premiere, which has been widely hyped and was ecstatically received by a packed house. But for all that there was much to enjoy, it hardly deserved such rapture, and there were problems with both piece and production.Marnie is a 1964 psychological thriller by Alfred Hitchcock, based on the Winston Graham novel of 1961. The opera looks Read more ...