Opera
BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2019 Final, BBC Four review - stage confidence, supportive set-upMonday, 24 June 2019
If ever there was an instance of the great being the enemy of the good, it happened after all the live singing on Saturday night. This year we all remember, with sadness for his early death and amazement at his burning, burnished talent, the... Read more... |
Brundibár, Welsh National Opera review - bittersweet children's opera from the ghettoMonday, 24 June 2019
Politics, in case you may not have noticed, has been in the air of late: questions of escape, release, borders, refugees, things like that. So WNO’s June season of operas about freedom has been suspiciously well timed. We’ve had the dead man walking... Read more... |
Belshazzar, The Grange Festival review – songs of freedomMonday, 24 June 2019
Cut almost anywhere into the lesser-known seams of Handel’s oratorios and you may strike plentiful nuggets of the purest gold. It may not be quite the case that Handel's Belshazzar, its score studded with nearly-forgotten musical treasures, has... Read more... |
Anna Bolena, Longborough Festival Opera review - Henry VIII's court becomes a sexualised death cultMonday, 24 June 2019
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Anne Boleyn is number two on the list, so anyone who can remember even that much Tudor history can guess that Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is not going to end well. The overture has hardly ended... Read more... |
Boris Godunov, Royal Opera review - cool and surgical, with periodic chillsThursday, 20 June 2019
Suppose you're seeing Musorgsky's selective historical opera for the first time in Richard Jones's production, without any prior knowledge of the action. That child's spinning-top on the dropcloth: why? Then the curtain rises and we see Bryn Terfel'... Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, ENO, Regent's Park Open Air Theatre review - into the broomstick woodsTuesday, 18 June 2019
Shoving a child-eating drag-queen witch into an oven can't be good for any kid's psyche. Director Timothy Sheader doesn't let us forget it in a production which nevertheless treads a fine line between the darkness of the Grimm story and the... Read more... |
Franco Zeffirelli: 'I had this feeling that I was special'Saturday, 15 June 2019
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English.... Read more... |
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Nevill Holt Opera review - sprinkled with musical fairy-dustThursday, 13 June 2019
“For I have found Demetrius like a jewel. Mine own, and not mine own.” Mine own and not mine own. This idea of transfiguration, of things familiar but somehow altered – is the spark that animates both Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and... Read more... |
Porgy and Bess, Grange Park Opera review - good versus evil in Catfish RowMonday, 10 June 2019
If you go to a British country house opera to see a work about an addict and a cripple in a poverty-stricken Deep South tenement, you know the contrast between stage and garden marquee will be extreme. Seeing Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess at Grange... Read more... |
Un ballo in maschera, Opera Holland Park review - evocative and sensationally sungMonday, 10 June 2019
A masked ball is a time of play and role-play, celebrating the duality, the conflicting selves within us all, allowing us to set aside our everyday public mask put on an alter ego for the evening. It seems appropriate then that Verdi’s Un ballo in... Read more... |
Cendrillon, Glyndebourne Festival review - busy but engagingMonday, 10 June 2019
Cendrillon is Jules Massenet’s operatic version of Cinderella, based on the Charles Perrault story of 1698. It is a fairly faithful to the story we know, although it includes a dark third act, the scene after the ball, where Cendrillon attempts... Read more... |
Falstaff, The Grange Festival review - belly laughs and bags of funSaturday, 08 June 2019
What is the perfect country house opera? A Midsummer Night’s Dream? L’elisir? Cenerentola? Figaro? All are strong contenders, but in the absence of anyone brave enough to stage Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest the winner – surely –... Read more... |
