fri 04/07/2025
Home > opera

Opera Reviews

Così fan tutte, Grand Theatre, Leeds

graham Rickson Saturday, 12 September 2009

The film critic Mark Kermode maintains that if a film is advertised on the side of a bus, it will inevitably be rubbish. Opera North are advertising this revival of Tim Albery’s 2004 Così fan tutte extensively on the sides of buses here in Leeds. Kermode’s theorem evidently doesn’t hold for opera.

Read more...

Doctor Atomic, ENO

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Tuesday, 23 June 2009

Among the most astonishing moments in John Adams's new opera Doctor Atomic (currently running at the English National Opera) is an aria at the end of the first act. The eponymous brains behind the Manhattan Project, Dr J. Robert Oppenheimer, stands alone on stage with his new creation, a spherical A-bomb coated in wires and tubes like a patient in intensive care, and sings John Donne's holy sonnet "Batter my heart, three-person'd God".

Read more...

Pages

inside opera

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Album: Kesha - .

“I’m, like, pop star when I have to pop star, and then I’m...

Hill review, Sky Documentaries - how Damon Hill battled his...

Some world champion racing drivers make it look effortless, but it was never that way for Damon Hill. His path to the championship he won in 1996...

Glastonbury Festival 2025: Five Somerset summer days of musi...

MONDAY 30th JUNE 2025

“I think you’d better drive,” says Finetime, his face sallow, skull-sockets underscored by...

The Shrouds review - he wouldn't let it lie

“Dying is an act of eroticism,” suggested one of the many disposable characters in David Cronenberg’s first full-length feature, Shivers...

Album: Claudia Brücken - Night Mirror

German singer Claudia Brücken has had a long and busy career,...

Jurassic World Rebirth review - prehistoric franchise gets a...

The first Jurassic Park movie now seems virtually Jurassic itself, having been released in the sepia-tinged year of 1993. Directed with...

Album: Mocky - Music Will Explain (Choir Music Vol. 1)

Dominic “Mocky” Salole has had a long career in which the tension between authenticity and pastiche has been a constant. Toronto-born, of English...

Semele, Royal Opera review - unholy smoke

Poor, slightly silly Semele fries at the sight of lover Jupiter casting off his mortal form, but in Congreve’s and Handel’s supposedly happy...

Sudan, Remember Us review - the revolution will be memorised

In 2019, French-Tunisian journalist and documentary filmmaker Hind Meddeb flew to Sudan after the overthrow of hated dictator Omar al-Bashir,...