It’s a dilemma of anniversary years, and never more so than with Wagner’s and Verdi’s 200th birthdays: do you stick to the masterpieces or try and bring the rarities to life? No-one would have minded, I suspect, if Antonio Pappano and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia forces he has raised to the level of one of the world’s great ensembles had reprised their peerless Verdi Requiem. It was unfortunate, then, if some of us sat with interest through unusual fare wishing for better alternatives in every case.Oh for the Ave Maria of Otello’s Desdemona, you couldn’t help thinking as ethereal Italian Read more ...

Revivals are for a conductor to show off some voices he’s discovered, do some role debuts, develop some careers, and as far as the production's concerned pour new wine into old bottles. There was some good new wine in this revival of Elijah Moshinsky's 22-year-old production. The Abkhazian soprano Hibla Gerzmava was the shining beauty, doing her first Amelia, with a sterling new tenor voice coming from the American Russell Thomas. Thomas Hampson made his house debut in the role of pirate-turned-Doge Simon Boccanegra, and Dimitri Platanias - a previous Rigoletto in the house - debuted as his Read more ...

Once in a blue moon, the judges would seem to have got it wrong.  I can think only of 2001, when stunning Latvian mezzo Elina Garanča failed to win the coveted goblet but has since gone on to deserved fame as one of the top half-dozen singers on the international stage today. This year, though, it was business as usual: the panel lit up by a gracious Dame Kiri, three of the singers who didn’t make it to the final,sound telly opera trouper Mary King and I all agreed that regal American with a twinkle Jamie Barton deserved the palm.How so, given that all five finalists – not to mention the Read more ...

In this revival of Richard Jones's 2009 production, the action has been very effectively shifted to post-war Windsor with Sir John Falstaff (Laurent Naouri) as down-at-heel gentry maintaining delusions of superiority, rubbing up against an ascendant middle class. Nannetta and Fenton are presumably about to play their part in the baby boom. Period features abound, from chintz and mock Tudor to soda siphons, troupes of Brownies and a Victrola cabinet.There are witty little touches, which add to the visual appeal of the production, such as the presence of a (not terribly realistic) cat in every Read more ...

An operatic truism still doing the rounds declares that for Verdi's Il trovatore you need four of the greatest singers in the world. For Don Carlo, his biggest opus in every way, you need six. Nicholas Hytner's Covent Garden staging hits the mark third time around with five, the exception being a very honourable replacement for what would have been an interesting piece of casting. Add to the mix the experienced command of Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano, supportive of the singers but also attentive to every instrumental detail, and it's as near to Verdian perfection as we're Read more ...

It was clear that there was an Italian on the podium. Muted strings invoked an atmosphere so crepuscular that, when one involuntarily closed one’s eyes, the murmur of voices intoning the words “Requiem aeternam” seemed to come from deep inside the cathedral. The theatricality of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem is inescapable but what was also inescapable under Daniele Gatti’s baton was that every phrase, instrumental and vocal, is breathed as a singer might breathe it. Already, as the opening pages of the piece unfolded, one noted Gatti’s way of keeping the line fluent and singable with dovetailed Read more ...

First, the good news: you can see Wagner’s entire Ring at the Royal Albert Hall, with absolutely the world’s finest Wagner singers and conductor in concert, for a grand total of £20. The bad news is that unless you have a season ticket – in which case it works out even cheaper – you’ll probably have to queue for most of the day to guarantee a place in the Arena or Gallery, and then you’ll still need the energy to stand for up to five hours an evening.None of that will deter devoted Prommers, whose numbers swell and grow younger every season. Little wonder, with the price of £5 a ticket held Read more ...

"Oh, wretched old man! You are but the shadow of the king”, sings Plácido Domingo’s Nebuchadnezzar about himself in Lear-like abjection before his Goneril-Reganish daughter (the flame-throwing Liudmyla Monastyrska). It’s only true of this brief phase in the protagonist’s sketchy operatic trajectory from hubris brought low to piety raised on high. And it’s certainly not applicable to the one-time top tenor’s latest assumption of a Verdi baritone role, one which may lack the finer nuances of Rigoletto or Simon Boccanegra but which has its moments, all of which Domingo takes with aplomb.The Read more ...

Simon Boccanegra has, as English Touring Opera’s director James Conway points out, never quite made the running outside Italy amid Verdi’s output. It went through three to five different versions in a short space of time. Despite the Romeo and Juliet era setting (14th-century Genoa battling it out with Venice) there are naivetes in Piave and Boito’s plot which, despite the frenetic story’s many merits, generate more than the usual operatic implausibilities. These render some of the quickly changing political frummeries all but comic, so that Otello and Falstaff tend to make better running Read more ...

How’s a good time girl to bare her beautiful soul when a director seems bent on cutting her down to puppet size? It doesn't bother me that Peter Konwitschny shears Verdi’s already concise score by about 20 minutes to shoehorn it into a one-act drama; what goes is either inessential or among the usual casualties of standard Traviatas. The spare and economical idea of layered curtains to symbolise the characters' constriction or emancipation is good in principle, too. But so impassioned is American soprano Corinne Winters’s Violetta that to rob her of any meaningful relationships with the man Read more ...

The overpowering nastiness of Shakespeare’s source material is offset by Verdi’s sublime, impeccably judged music; this is a wonderful opera with barely a dud moment. Trust the score, get decent singers and an understanding, intelligent conductor, and everything should be fine.The one rocky moment in Opera North’s new production of Otello comes in the opening minutes; Verdi’s storm-tossed prelude blasts out gloriously, the huge ensemble cast enter and stare boldly out into the auditorium. And yet, when the solo singing starts it’s almost impossible to ascertain where the individual voices are Read more ...

Assured, warm and comfy, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut Quartet is a tasteful farce of froths and strops. Hoffman’s always wanted to direct and it’s not like he hasn’t tried. Dead Poets Society slipped from his hands, both starring and directing, when he didn’t say yes quickly enough (Robin Williams got the part). In the 1970s Hoffman bought the screen rights to Edward (Runaway Train) Bunker's No Beast So Fierce, intending to direct. After a few weeks, he gave the job to his friend Ulu Grosbard. Things turned bad: Hoffman wasn’t happy with Grosbard’s vision of "his" film, with Grosbard Read more ...