Phyllida Lloyd’s production of La Bohème for Opera North is over 32 years old but still feels young. And for its audiences it still has the ability to capture – as the opera is designed to – the experience of youthful love and separation, its ecstasy and its heartbreak.It's set in the 1950s or early 1960s, rather than the 19th century. But in some respects it takes its cue from the stories that Puccini and his collaborators used as their source material, Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, and the format they created from them. What we see are literally scenes – tableaux – with Read more ...

Turning Handel oratorio into opera can be a rewarding enterprise. Charles Edwards’ presentation of Joshua, over 15 years ago, for instance, was very effective for Opera North in using projection as well as costume design to make a parallel of the biblical story with Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. And the score offered some vintage material, including the original version of “See the conquering hero comes” and “O had I Jubal’s lyre”.Others have done similar things: Samson – based on Milton’s work in what he considered to be the style of Greek drama – is a text that cries out to be Read more ...

Marianne Moore once famously defined poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”. Operas also fill, or anyway should fill, their artificial horticulture with genuine beasts – and flowers. And no work demands the population of a fanciful landscape with authentic passion more urgently than Così fan tutte. Mozart transforms this shabby little shocker of a plot – as the meddling know-all Don Alfonso “tests” the two sisters’ fidelity to their sweethearts – into a vehicle for music of exquisite truthfulness that grows from a bed of fraud and lies.At the Nevill Holt festival in rural Read more ...

Saturday night could have given us the opportunity to witness the Opera North debut of Canadian soprano Layla Claire at the Grand Theatre, as well as Annabel Arden’s new production of The Flying Dutchman.Sadly, the first of those was reduced to her “walking” the role of Senta on the night, while Mari Wyn Williams sang the part from the score at the side of the stage. It proved a remarkable performance from each of them, but naturally not the experience that had been planned. On that night, Mari Wyn Williams was exceptionally intelligent in integrating her singing to the action she was Read more ...

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in Love Life, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical from 1948, it’s all the same country. The couple whose marriage is at the centre of it all are seen in different eras of US history, and while they hardly age, the country changes vastly.It's an extraordinary piece for the Broadway of its time. Credited with being the first “concept musical”, it frames its story as a piece of vaudeville (by 1948 already a thing of the past), with a Magician whose act introduces Sam and Susan Cooper by having him suspended in the air and Read more ...

Martin Duncan’s 2008 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of the best and funniest things Opera North has ever done – back now again (it was also seen in 2013-14), in the company’s autumn season of revivals.The idea, hinted at in the staging and suggested in its original publicity, that Britten’s vision of Shakespeare’s enchanted world could be presented in terms of “psychedelia” and even likened to an acid trip, on the grounds that those things were part of the 1960s and Britten completed his opera in 1960, is, strictly speaking, a minor anachronism. Such things came late in Read more ...

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 ...

Opera North have a new pairing for Mascagni’s popular but clichéd Cavalleria Rusticana in this double bill: an early Rachmaninov one-acter, written when he was 19. The production of the former is a revival of the one seen in 2017 in their Little Greats season, and its director then, Karolina Sofulak, has returned to create this Aleko alongside it.So interest is inevitably more in what she has done with the new piece, and, intriguingly, how she has used the overlapping casting of the two to find striking resonances in their stories.Both are tragic tales of murder born of infidelity and Read more ...

Reviving Tim Albery’s production of Così fan tutte, now almost 20 years old, again at Leeds Grand Theatre, Opera North have a bet that’s as safe as Don Alfonso’s in the story – that “Women are all the same”. It’s a sure-fire winner, and the best part this time round lies in the balance and contrast of both voices and personalities in the casting of the central pairs of lovers.Albery sees the piece as a kind of Enlightenment-era scientific demonstration, in which truth is to be revealed by an unblinking camera lens. Almost all the action takes place inside a giant “camera obscura”, as we Read more ...

Reviving Giles Havergal’s 2013 production from its “Festival of Britten” of that year, Opera North have an Albert Herring that’s both immersive and intimate, to quote their own publicity.Immersive because it was designed specifically for the refurbished Howard Assembly Room inside the Grand Theatre buildings in Leeds, with the audience mainly on two sides of the long performance space, with a few at the narrow end furthest from the 13-piece orchestra; intimate because it’s all very close-up, the action taking place often only a few feet away from us. (It isn’t going to tour, unlike the other Read more ...

Choosing a limited best seems almost meaningless when even simply the seven operatic experiences I've relished in the run-up to Christmas (nothing seasonal) deserve a place in the sun. But in a year which has seen Arts Council devastation versus brilliant business as usual where possible, English National Opera – faced with “Manchester or die” – needs the first shout-out for doing everything the moneygivers want it to.That came in the shape of Jeanine Tesori's Blue, with a powerful, unpreachy libretto by Tazewell Thompson, its very originally shaped drama of a young American Black boy Read more ...

The signal achievement of this production of La Rondine may be that James Hurley (director) and Kerem Hasan (conductor) have rehabilitated it to its proper place, against the perception that it’s the least successful of Puccini’s mature operas.Even Tito Ricordi, the composer’s publisher, apparently called it “bad Léhar”, and subsequent commentators have found an incongruity in its marriage of an Italian late-romantic lushness with a succession of waltz tunes that seem reminiscent of Austro-German operetta – and also the fact that the plotline seems over-dependent on ideas from Die Fledermaus Read more ...