Cardiff
Hansel and Gretel, Welsh National OperaSunday, 22 February 2015
After 16 years one might expect a revival of a repertory opera like Hansel and Gretel to come up with a dusty look and frayed edges. But Benjamin Davis has done a brilliant job pumping the life back into Richard Jones’s memorable but intricate 1998... Read more... |
Richard III, Wales Millennium CentreThursday, 12 February 2015
The casual theatre-goer may be forgiven for thinking that, in Wales at least, serious theatre is going through a phase of chronic disregard for the audience. Yvonne Murphy’s all-female Richard III, performed in the rafters of the monolithic Wales... Read more... |
The Frozen Scream, Wales Millennium CentreThursday, 18 December 2014
There are moments in this collaboration between performer and theatre impresario Christopher Green and best-selling novelist Sarah Waters, where, rather like with a Stewart Lee stand-up routine, the audience has to make a conscious decision whether... Read more... |
Rachmaninov Vespers, Maryinsky Chorus, Llandaff CathedralFriday, 07 November 2014
Anyone whose affection for Rachmaninov is bounded by the Second Piano Concerto or the Paganini Rhapsody might be surprised to learn that his own favourite work of his was his setting for unaccompanied choir of the Vespers, or All-Night Vigil, of the... Read more... |
Romeo and Juliet, Sherman Cymru, CardiffSunday, 12 October 2014
When unveiling her first season at Sherman Cymru earlier this year, new artistic director Rachel O’Riordan gave voice to two ambitions: to generate new writing within Wales, and produce classic texts which specifically resonate with the audience.... Read more... |
Maudie's Rooms, Bute Street, Cardiff BayMonday, 14 April 2014
Cardiff Bay’s Bute Street is home to many imposing buildings, a large number of which are derelict. They have the potential to become something more than they currently are. They can be revived, and that’s what Louise Osborn has done by mounting her... 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... Read more... |
Roberto Devereux, Welsh National OperaThursday, 03 October 2013
Whatever it was about the kings and queens of England that so intrigued Donizetti, it certainly wasn’t their politics. The third, and last, in WNO’s autumn cycle shows Elizabeth once again in a state of unrequited love with one of her rebellious (... Read more... |
Anna Bolena, Welsh National OperaSunday, 08 September 2013
“Let the florid music praise,” sing Britten and Auden in their On This Island cycle; and I suppose we must do as we’re told, though aesthetic duty can be a hard taskmaster. For me it cracks its whip in the three Donizetti operas that, inexplicably,... Read more... |
Paul Bunyan, Welsh National Youth Opera, CardiffSaturday, 24 August 2013
Reading through WH Auden’s libretto for Britten’s first stage work – the so-called operetta Paul Bunyan – it’s sometimes hard to decide whether the intention was to participate in the great American dream or to make fun of it. In 1941 both artists... Read more... |
Wagner Dream, Welsh National OperaFriday, 07 June 2013
Those who knew the composer Jonathan Harvey, who died of motor neurone disease last December, will remember him as the least demonstrative, least theatrical of men. His presence was gentle, soft-spoken, essentially inward – the physical image of the... Read more... |
Lohengrin, Welsh National OperaFriday, 24 May 2013
What is one to make of Lohengrin, Wagner’s last “opera” (as opposed to music drama), in this day and age? Is it a medieval romance, like Weber’s Freischütz but with a deus ex machina at the beginning rather than the end; or is it a nineteenth-... Read more... |
