fri 11/07/2025

Opera

Elektra/Der Rosenkavalier, Nightly Met Opera Streams review - searing hits and indulgent misses

A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. There's been real thought behind the wealth of...

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Classical Music/Opera direct to home 6 - Parsifals for Easter

Wagner's final drama, of learning, suffering and redemption through compassion, is second only to Bach's Passions at this time of year, and seems likely to strike a special note in the present crisis. Opera companies around the world, making much in...

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The Rake's Progress, Complicité online review - well-projected journey from pastoral to madhouse

One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration with W H Auden and Chester Kallman is as a numbers opera in nine pictures, four of them indebted to Hogarth's series of paintings/prints. So it's not surprising that visual flair has marked...

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The Turn of the Screw, Opera North, OperaVision review - claustrophobic visions of terror and beauty

Feeling stir-crazy right now? Imagine being confined to one room with a half-crazed housekeeper, two dysfunctional kids and two increasingly insistent ghosts, plagued by nightmares, unable even to get out into the garden or walk down to the lake....

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Le nozze di Figaro, Garsington Opera, OperaVision review - natural comedy, musical sublimity

Only the birds will be singing at country opera houses around the UK this summer. Glyndebourne seems over-optimistic in declaring that it might be able to launch in July; other companies with shorter seasons have made the regretful but right...

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Classical music/Opera direct to home: 3 - Two Jenůfas

We're learning fast what works and what doesn't with online arts offerings in a time of coronavirus. A distinguished young pianist I know rightly pointed out to me yesterday that however good the artists sharing their talents with us from their...

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Sondheim at 90 Songs: 2 - 'Epiphany'/'A Little Priest'

Two numbers, one hair-raising slice of music-theatre. When Sondheim's paying homage to the older, revue type of musical, you can extract a string of top hits: Follies, from which Marianka Swain chose "I'm Still Here" yesterday, could yield at least...

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The Marriage of Figaro, English National Opera review - energised attitudes, lower-level humanism

So Susanna and Figaro got married on Saturday, just before the entire Almaviva household and its home, the London Coliseum, went into quarantine. Let's at least celebrate the fact that these splendid singer-actors, with youth especially on the five...

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Susanna, Royal Opera/London Handel Festival review - fitful shinings

That virtue can be fascinating and prayers to a just God dramatic have been proved in riveting productions of two late Handel oratorios, Theodora and Jephtha. Whether Susanna can ever be reclaimed for the stage as powerfully seems unlikely, but this...

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Fidelio, Royal Opera review - fitfully vivid singing in a dramatic void

Emblazoned on a drop-curtain in front of a mirror-image of the auditorium, the three great tenets of the French revolution seem to be mocking us right at the start, above all the second of them: equality, really, given the make-up of the Royal Opera...

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Cosi fan tutte, English Touring Opera review - a blissful, uncomplicated delight

Cosi fan tutte is, as the opera’s subtitle clearly tells us, “A School for Lovers”. But too often these days it can feel like a school for the audience. Joyless productions lecture us sternly on the battle of the sexes – on chauvinism, feminism,...

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Nixon in China, Scottish Opera - musical chatter, poetic banality

Scotland was at the cutting edge of culture in 1988, when the Edinburgh International Festival hosted the UK premiere of Nixon in China in the Houston Grand Opera production at the cavernous Playhouse. John Adams’ first opera, documenting the...

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