Opera
Blue, English National Opera review - the company’s boldest vindication yet?Monday, 24 April 2023
Two recent operas by women have opened in London’s two main houses within a week. Both have superbly crafted librettos dealing with gun violence without a shot being fired, giddyingly fine production values and true ensembles guided by perfect... Read more... |
Arminio, Royal Opera review - Handel does Homeland, and it worksSaturday, 22 April 2023
Invasion by a colonising power has convulsed a country, dividing families – even individuals – between the rival claims of resistance and collaboration. A captured freedom-fighter from the indigenous elite faces execution; an imperial general hopes... Read more... |
Innocence, Royal Opera review - timely, layered drama with almost incidental musicTuesday, 18 April 2023
To create a sensitive and original music-drama around the subject of a school killing is a colossal achievement. Director Simon Stone, set designer Chloe Lamford and novelist Sofi Oksanen’s cutting libretto make Innocence seem like a masterpiece. I... Read more... |
Theodora, Arcangelo, Cohen, Barbican review - gloriously dark and soberThursday, 30 March 2023
Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4th-century Rome. It’s a red rag to directors, and there’s a relief to seeing the oratorio in the concert hall,... Read more... |
Mansfield Park, RNCM, Manchester review - bringing out the bestWednesday, 29 March 2023
Mansfield Park was written to be a country house opera – that kind where you have a smallish number of performers, no chorus, and the “set” is simply the rooms and furnishings of a gracious residence from an age gone by.Accompaniment was originally... Read more... |
The Dead City, English National Opera review - strong dream world, weak love storyMonday, 27 March 2023
Is Korngold a second-rank composer with some first-rate ideas? Most performances of the 23-year-old Viennese prodigy's Die tote Stadt make it seem so. Nearly smothered in glitter and craft, the story can compel – an oblique, promising stance on... Read more... |
Turandot, Royal Opera review - spectacle and sound wow in this significant revivalTuesday, 21 March 2023
Nearly 40 years old, Andrei Serban’s Royal Opera Turandot feels like a gilded relic (I felt like a relic myself on learning that my writer neighbour wasn’t born when I saw Gwyneth Jones as the ice princess in 1984). Yet so too, outwardly, did... Read more... |
La bella dormente nel bosco/L'enfant et les sortilèges, Royal College of Music review - pure theatrical magicWednesday, 15 March 2023
Childhood fantasies and adult fears – sometimes it’s a fine line between the two. And it’s one that director Liam Steel walks with unerring precision in his ravishing new double-bill for the Royal College of Music: an overflowing toybox of invention... Read more... |
Blaze of Glory!, Welsh National Opera review - sparkling entertainment up the valleysMonday, 13 March 2023
Like certain other opera companies, WNO has leant in recent years towards popular shows of one kind or another. In their case this is not mere pandering to the Valleys coach parties, but a genuine attempt to assert an identity through an exploration... Read more... |
Der Rosenkavalier, Irish National Opera review - world-class delightMonday, 06 March 2023
Silver rose, golden voices. Richard Strauss calls for four of the best: two sopranos and a mezzo for the love-triangle that develops between a 17-year-old Count, his 32-year-old lover and the girl he falls for at first sight; a bass as one of opera’... Read more... |
The Magic Flute, Welsh National Opera review - Mozart remodelled and remuddledMonday, 06 March 2023
So why not rewrite The Magic Flute with a new text and a heavily reconstructed plot? After all, the original was just a pantomime, albeit one that embodied one or two big issues of the day (1791), but essentially popular theatre with a text by a... Read more... |
In The Realms of Sorrow, London Handel Festival, Stone Nest review - disappointed love has all the best tunesSaturday, 04 March 2023
Raw, muscular, visceral, haunting – this was Handel as you’ve never experienced him before. In this striking entry for the London Handel Festival, an uncompromising production by Adele Thomas with conductor Laurence Cummings took four of the... Read more... |
