Opera Reviews
Les Vêpres Siciliennes, Royal OperaFriday, 18 October 2013
First fanfare had to be for the Royal Opera House’s main gambit in Verdi bicentenary year, staging its first ever Sicilian Vespers 158 years after the Paris premiere. Any of Verdi’s operas from Rigoletto onwards deserves the red carpet treatment, and this unwieldy epic, with its opportunistic grafting of a melodramatic plot on to the Palermitans’ massacre of the French in 1282, has more than enough vintage music to be worthy of anyone’s close attention. Read more... |
Madam Butterfly, English National OperaTuesday, 15 October 2013
When the going gets tough, wheel out a crowd-pleaser. Even by its own volatile standards English National Opera has had a poor start to its autumn season, with productions of Fidelio and Die Fledermaus that seem destined to join the company’s ever-growing chamber of unrevivable horrors. ENO’s cash-strapped board must therefore be lighting another candle to the late Anthony Minghella, whose glacially delicate Madam Butterfly is always good for an outing. Read more... |
Jason/Agrippina, English Touring OperaWednesday, 09 October 2013
English Touring Opera has form when it comes to baroque opera. Handelfest in 2009 marked the composer’s 250th anniversary with a sequence of excellent stagings, while 2010’s The Duenna was a riotous and irreverent musical delight, and there was an Alcina back in 2005 that still sticks in the memory for all the right reasons. Read more... |
Roberto Devereux, Welsh National OperaThursday, 03 October 2013
Whatever it was about the kings and queens of England that so intrigued Donizetti, it certainly wasn’t their politics. The third, and last, in WNO’s autumn cycle shows Elizabeth once again in a state of unrequited love with one of her rebellious (and much younger) nobility, but wholly unconcerned with affairs of state; and the one thing that distinguishes her from the average abandoned woman of Romantic opera is that she has the power to decapitate her uncooperative swains. Read more... |
The Wasp Factory, Linbury Studio TheatreThursday, 03 October 2013
A baby's brain is polished off by a throbbing welter of maggots. A field of sheep are on fire. A screaming child whose hands have been tied to a kite is flying out over the North Sea. How do you make an opera out of any of this? The answer of course is you don’t. You leave this kind of thing to cinema or the novel. Opera is - contrary to popular belief - extremely bad at spectacle, especially if the aim is to terrify. Horror has never had much of a look-in as a genre in the art form. Read more... |
Die Fledermaus, English National OperaTuesday, 01 October 2013
Rich, racy, randy and irreverent: such were the R words gathered up by a Canadian critic to capture the essence of Christopher Alden’s production of Johann Strauss’s cork-popping operetta when it premiered in Toronto last year. Other R words, alas, came to my mind, like rubbish, reprehensible, risible, even rigor mortis. Read more... |
Peter Grimes, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival HallSunday, 29 September 2013
For Londoners unable to travel up to Aldeburgh – or, now, to Leeds for the revival of Phyllida Lloyd’s Opera North production – this was the only chance in Britten centenary year to be blitzed by his seminal masterpiece. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Opera NorthSunday, 29 September 2013
All starts with a barely perceptible bass rumble, before Britten’s lower strings begin their queasy glissandi, shifting key signature every few seconds. It’s a wonderful operatic opening, here teased out with deft mystery by conductor Stuart Stratford. Read more... |
Fidelio, English National OperaThursday, 26 September 2013
The first words we hear don’t belong to Fidelio at all. The first music does, but not at all where you expect to find it. If you’ve read your programme (and who does before the show begins?) you’ll find a poem entitled “Labyrinth” by Jorge Luis Borges from a collection In Praise of Darkness. Read more... |
Elektra, Royal OperaTuesday, 24 September 2013
“Strike again,” cries Elektra as her brother stabs their mother to death. It’s third strike lucky for this Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s singular mythic horror. In previous manifestations of designer-director Charles Edwards’ rather over-freighted but ever improving staging, conductors Semyon Bychkov and Mark Elder, as well as top-less soprano Lisa Gasteen and the more nuanced but sometimes underpowered Susan Bullock, missed the heart of the matter... Read more... |
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