Mozart
Ed Vulliamy
Ten years ago, Ian Page launched his and the Mozartists’ (then Classical Opera’s) remarkable endeavour to play music by WA Mozart 250 years after it was written, starting with a programme of material from 1765 by eight-year-old Mozart, and his contemporaries.Page said at that moment: “When we play this music, I can bank on half the critics pointing out that it’s not as good as Figaro. But what matters is that Mozart could and would not have written Figaro had he not written these early pieces in the extraordinary way he did.”The series will conclude in 2041, when the conductor Read more ...
Mark Kidel
The Marriage of Figaro is undoubtedly one of the greatest operas ever written. Mozart’s masterpiece is a display of musical perfection that never ceases to touch the heart and stimulate the musical mind.This gripping and enormously entertaining tale of love, illusion and betrayal, draws its appeal and strength from an array of fallible characters, laid bare by their foibles and yet united in humanity. Opera Project’s paired down production at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, stays close to the brilliance of music and plot, never tempted to bring this magisterial work up to date or score points from Read more ...
Robert Beale
In an autumn season of three revivals, Opera North begin by inviting James Brining, artistic director of Leeds Playhouse, to oversee his own production from five years ago of Mozart and Emanual Schikaneder’s extraordinary musical play. It’s the mainstay of the season, returning in 2025 (with some cast changes) as well as dominating the next two months.The fifth version of The Magic Flute I’ve seen from the company, and one of the best, it’s performed in English, with side-titles in use to ensure that no one misses the progress of the story.Technology has changed, and a creation that Read more ...
Robert Beale
“Mozart, made in Manchester”, the project to perform and record an edition of the piano concertos plus all the opera overtures, seemed a distant destination and an unlikely marathon when Manchester Camerata embarked on it eight years ago.But with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy sticking with it through thick and thin (including Covid), they got to the final tape last night at the Stoller Hall in Chetham’s School of Music. The hall didn’t even exist when it all began: the first performances were at the Royal Northern College of Music. But the idea has slowly taken flight and Read more ...
Simon Thompson
I’m all in favour of the EIF taking artistic risks, and of them bringing a high-prestige international production to Edinburgh. This Marriage of Figaro from Berlin’s Komische Oper is both of those things, because it is the first production by Kirill Serebrennikov – the high profile Russian director, placed under house arrest by the Putin regime, now based in Berlin – to be seen in the UK.But the EIF agreed to host it before its Berlin premiere, and while they must have had their suspicions about how “radical” it was, I doubt they were prepared for just what a mess it turned out to be. For one Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
My three Proms so far this year have all featured regional BBC orchestras conducted by women, all excellent, and it surely reflects well on the Proms management that they have done so much to address this gender imbalance in recent years. In last night’s Prom 36 the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra were led by the New Zealander Gemma New, who navigated a programme of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Bonis with élan, good humour and a gorgeous black frock coat.Before doing my research, the name Mel Bonis would have suggested an Australian Olympic athlete, or Californian surf champion, but she was in Read more ...
David Nice
“Tradition is sloppiness,” Mahler the opera conductor is credited with saying. But in the case of old master John Cox’s long-serving Garsington production of the greatest of operatic comedes, not if it’s refreshed with the subtlest insights in to human tensions and frailties.This time the house’s brilliant director of Strauss masterpieces, Bruno Ravella, who worked as assistant to Cox at the old Garsington in 2005, has been called in to fine-tune a rather wonderful cast, with relative youthfulness among the leads, and serves up a blissful Mozart evening totally in tune with the environment, Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Five years after it first clattered onto the Glyndebourne stage, André Barbe and Renaud Doucet’s visually exuberant Die Zauberflöte – featuring everything from dancing carcasses to a monster made out of blue-and-white crockery – continues to dazzle as much as it entertains.Yet despite being a cornucopia of invention, it’s not always clear whether this production – set in a grand hotel kitchen at the turn of the 20th century – provides a solution to the opera’s problems, or simply eclipses them with decoration. Following a brief technical hitch at the start – in which a Glyndebourne official Read more ...
Robert Beale
There’s a sense of cheerful abandon about Manchester Camerata’s Mozart concerts with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Gábor Takács-Nagy that is hard to resist.So it wasn’t exactly the programme originally advertised, and the concept of performing and recording all Mozart’s piano concertos with all his opera overtures has stretched a bit as time has gone by, but this was the penultimate in a series that began not far off 10 years ago – and they were going to have fun.The concerto element, in strict fact, was Johann Christian Bach as recycled by Mozart: three piano sonatas by the London Bach turned Read more ...
Mark Kidel
Sabine Devieilhe, as with many other great sopranos, elicits much fan worship, with no less than three encores at her recent Wigmore Hall recital. In her native France, and in the rest of Europe, she has gathered ecstatic reviews for her performance and recording of a range of repertoire that stretches from the Baroque and Mozart to Richard Strauss, Debussy and Poulenc.Accompanied by Mathieu Pordoy, she offered the rapt audience at the Wigmore an artfully designed programme of Mozart and Strauss, weaving her way through surprising segues and contrasts with seamless ease. On the face of it, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Trials by fire and water pale in comparison with trials by Arts Council England. English National Opera’s long torment has lately involved redundancy notices issued mid-performance and the enforcement of a sub-standard contract for chorus and musicians. Yet here they are, singing and playing their hearts out in an exhilarating reprise of a trusted old favourite: Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute, first staged in 2013 and now on its fourth outing in the capable hands of revival director Rachael Hewer.I know that McBurney’s busy, tricksy take on the mystical pantomime of Mozart’s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
We can’t do without Così fan tutte; it’s an irresistible masterpiece. But it’s a thorn in the flesh of modern directors, who struggle to find the "relevance" they seem to need in order to get the wretched piece on to the stage.In his new production for Welsh National Opera, Max Hoehn latches on to the opera’s subtitle "The School for Lovers", ignoring da Ponte’s irony and setting it in an actual school; but this is yet another of those doomed concepts that should have remained where they probably originated, among the dirty plates and half-empty wine glasses at the end of a boozy dinner party Read more ...