Opera
The Rake's Progress, Complicité online review - well-projected journey from pastoral to madhouseWednesday, 08 April 2020
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... Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Opera North, OperaVision review - claustrophobic visions of terror and beautyFriday, 03 April 2020
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.... Read more... |
Le nozze di Figaro, Garsington Opera, OperaVision review - natural comedy, musical sublimityMonday, 30 March 2020
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... Read more... |
Classical music/Opera direct to home: 3 - Two JenůfasWednesday, 25 March 2020
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... Read more... |
Sondheim at 90 Songs: 2 - 'Epiphany'/'A Little Priest'Tuesday, 24 March 2020
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... Read more... |
The Marriage of Figaro, English National Opera review - energised attitudes, lower-level humanismMonday, 16 March 2020
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... Read more... |
Susanna, Royal Opera/London Handel Festival review - fitful shiningsThursday, 12 March 2020
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... Read more... |
Fidelio, Royal Opera review - fitfully vivid singing in a dramatic voidMonday, 02 March 2020
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... Read more... |
Cosi fan tutte, English Touring Opera review - a blissful, uncomplicated delightMonday, 02 March 2020
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,... Read more... |
Nixon in China, Scottish Opera - musical chatter, poetic banalitySaturday, 29 February 2020
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... Read more... |
Denis and Katya, Music Theatre Wales / Uproar, Rafferty review - disturbing the untroubled monotony of South Wales musicSaturday, 29 February 2020
Once upon a time writing an opera was first and foremost a question of choosing a good story. But times move on, and today – as Nicholas Till reminds us in a fascinating programme note for Philip Venables’s and Ted Huffman’s new chamber opera – the... Read more... |
Luisa Miller, English National Opera review - Verdi in translation makes a stylish comebackThursday, 13 February 2020
Those who booed the production team last night - there was nothing but generous cheering for singers, conductor and orchestra - might reflect that this was at least regietheater, that singular brand of not-all-bad director's opera in Germany, with... Read more... |
