sopranos
David Nice
It's nine years since soprano Lise Davidsen gave a Wigmore Hall audience her first credentials as a recitalist, in true partnership with a pianist to whom she's remained faithful since, James Baillieu. Alexandra Coghlan welcomed her then, and while I'd been bowled over by her role in Pappano's Royal Opera Verdi Requiem and was stunned by her Sibelius Luonnotar, I had some questions about the first half of her Barbican recital. Any here were purely a matter of taste; her Schubert programme with Baillieu was finely shaped in every respect. You couldn't fail to love her by the end.Suffering Read more ...
David Nice
Bellini's most consistently inspired opera, director Orpha Phelan tells us, has been set on a pedestal. Well, a pedestal would have been good for the titular Druid high priestess to deliver her celebrated invocation, a moon, perhaps some trees for the sacred wood, a chorus standing still in a semicircle. Traditional? Yes, but so is the shallow window-dressing for a rather interesting love-triangle. Though there's a splendid bellicose chorus, taken at a terrific lick here, Phelan goes in hard on the war aspect by setting the whole thing in a ruined church, post-apocalypse (she writes), with Read more ...
David Nice
Most concerts of operatic excerpts serve up an after dinner mint. This one offered - to follow up Menotti's image of light versus serious in art - the very bread of life, albeit framed by familiar women's duets from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and Delibes' Lakmé. Jennifer Davis, about to make her role debut as Dvořák's Rusalka with Irish National Opera, may have been the initial draw, but mezzo Sarah Richmond was a revelation new to me in major roles, and pianist Aoife O'Sullivan knew no bounds in dramatic torrents, as well as setting up so poetically a perfect Rusalka Song to the Moon. Read more ...
David Nice
Conducting the staple Viennese fare of New Year's Day is no easy task. Quite apart from the basic essential panache - so drearily missing from Austrian Franz Welser-Möst's 2023 shot in Vienna itself, abundantly present this year from live wire Yannick Nézet-Séguin - there has to be the right space for the upbeat to the waltz, freedom in the melodies, energy but not mania in the fast polkas. 27-year-old Tom Fetherstonhaugh, best known as the founder of the enterprising Fantasia Orchestra, has the style in spades, and conveyed it to a clearly impressed National Symphony Orchestra Ireland, Read more ...
David Nice
Emotional truth backed up by musical sophistication is what saves Puccini’s drama about a geisha deserted by an American officer from mawkishness. Director Daisy Evans has a very good idea for getting at its palpitating heart in a production of stunning visual beauty; Celine Byrne in the title role gives us vocal opulence but not nearly enough identification with a woman whose total, misplaced love leads to painful hope and desperate tragedy.A student who was at a Dublin discussion with Evans told me her essential concept, and I thought it sounded promising: at Pinkerton’s funeral many years Read more ...
David Nice
A drawback of choosing relatively or very obscure operas, as they've been mostly doing in Wexford Festival since 1951, is that the audiences probably won’t come out humming the tunes. That changed this year with the inclusion of Le trouvère, which most of us know – minus the ballet music and a few striking changes in this French version – as Il trovatore. A risk, since budget forbade big names in the four main roles, but the casting yielded unexpected treasures.I'd go so far as to say a star is born in soprano Lydia Grindatto, taking on what notewise is the most demanding of them all, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Even in the 21st century, it may not take that long for an outlandish literary experiment to jump genres and become an established musical classic. In 2008, I enthusiastically reviewed a strange, poetic, almost Beckett-like novella by the writer and music critic Paul Griffiths.His let me tell you reconfigures the 483 words that the hapless Ophelia speaks in Hamlet into a haunting, melancholy first-person testament of love, sorrow and (in Griffiths’s version, if not Shakespeare’s) dogged survival. Five years later, the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen brilliantly embraced the intrinsic Read more ...
David Nice
Forget Anna Netrebko, if you ever gave the Russian Scarpia’s former cultural ambassador much thought (theartsdesk wouldn’t). It should be uphill from now on as Aleksandra Kurzak takes over the role of a diva out of her depth. Last night, though, she was unwell, and the role was taken by Ailyn Pérez, a lyric soprano who knows how to pull out all the right stops and whose dramatic truth complemented Oliver Mears’ production to perfection, presumably on little rehearsal time.Mears plays mostly by the Puccini/Giacosa/Illica rulebook of love and terror in totalitarian Rome - foolish the director Read more ...
Gary Naylor
That friend you have who hates musicals – probably male, probably straight, probably not seen one since The Sound of Music on BBC 1 after the Queen’s Speech in 1978 – well, don’t send them to Charing Cross Theatre for this show. But that other friend you have – enjoyed Hamilton, likes a bit of Sondheim, seen a couple of operas – do send them. They’re not guaranteed to like Stiletto, but they’ll find it interesting at worst and, whisper it because it's a new musical, they might actually thank you! We’re in 18th century Venice, pleasingly evoked by Ceri Calf's atmospheric set design and Anna Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It was the sonically adventurous, shiveringly atmospheric cello piece by Latvian composer Preteris Vasks that proved to be the first showstopper of this enjoyably esoteric evening. Dutch cellist Hadewych van Gent began the pianissimo movement of Vasks’ Gramata Cellam by creating a build-up of whistling harmonic effects on the A string, followed by a yearning feather-light improvisation in the cello’s upper registers that suddenly plunged vertiginously bass-wards.The rich, velvety chordal sequence that ensued was accompanied by Gent’s wordless soprano, as clear and piercing as a shaft of light Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
As Bono once commented about Luciano Pavarotti, “the opera follows him off stage”. Legendary soprano Maria Callas would have known exactly what he meant, and she herself said “an opera begins long before the curtain goes up and ends long after it has come down.”Pablo Larraín’s Maria completes his trilogy of films about famous and charismatic women at critical moments in their lives, the others being Jackie Kennedy (Jackie, 2016) and Princess Diana (Spencer, 2021). It picks up the daunting challenge of evoking the life but above all the myth of La Callas, one of a handful of opera legends who Read more ...
David Nice
In one sense it was a New Year’s Day “nearly”, just stopping short of giving us the already great Irish lyric-dramatic soprano Jennifer Davis in the music of the man she was born to sing, Richard Strauss. Berlin will witness her Arabella shortly, but the one Bavarian intruder in the otherwise all-Viennese carnival yesterday afternoon, the Moonlight Music from Capriccio, stopped before the Countess’s final scene.Yet that slice of heaven still served as a breath from another planet in a glittering programme: did the audience realise it was getting one of the world's best horn players, Alec Read more ...