Opera
Le Nozze di Figaro, The Grange Festival review – the dark side of powerFriday, 07 June 2019
Productions of The Marriage of Figaro tend to press their thumbs on the comic or tragic side of the scales that hover so evenly throughout Mozart’s inexhaustible work. Director Martin Lloyd-Evans mostly favoured a darker interpretation at The Grange... Read more... |
The Diary of One who Disappeared, ROH review – song cycle-as-opera is a mish-mashFriday, 07 June 2019
Singer Ian Bostridge once described The Diary of One who Disappeared as “a song cycle gone wrong”. But this reimagining of it as an opera, by the Belgian director Ivo van Hove at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, also goes wrong, throwing in... Read more... |
Das Rheingold, Longborough Festival Opera review - more Wagnerian excellence in a Gloucestershire barnThursday, 06 June 2019
The whole raison d’être of the Longborough Festival was always the performance of its founder Martin Graham’s beloved Wagner. So it’s perfectly natural that the twelfth anniversary of the start of the festival’s original Ring cycle should be marked... Read more... |
Manon Lescaut, Opera Holland Park review - attempt to empower commodified woman falls flatWednesday, 05 June 2019
"Waiting is always wearisome," declare the socialites as glitter-and-be-gay Manon Lescaut receives in the home of her nasty old "protector" Geronte. Despite the numerous sugar-plums Puccini weaves into his first fluent operatic masterpiece, waiting... Read more... |
The Bartered Bride, Garsington Opera review – musical glories, dramatic questionsMonday, 03 June 2019
It is a coincidence - and probably no more than that - that Garsington Opera has opened its 30th birthday season with the “founding work of modern Czech opera” in the year that also marks the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in... Read more... |
Bauci e Filemone/Orfeo, Classical Opera, QEH review - a star Orpheus is bornSaturday, 01 June 2019
All happy 18th century couples are alike, it seems, and that makes for a certain placidity in Gluck's pastoral Bauci e Filomene for the (unhappy) wedding of Ferdinand, Duke of Parma and Maria Amalia, Archduchess of Austria. All unhappy couples are... Read more... |
Agrippina, Barbican review - over-the-top comic brillianceSaturday, 01 June 2019
Flirtations and fragile alliances, lies, betrayals, schemes and the ever-present promise of sex – Love Island may be back on our screens next week, but it has nothing on Handel's Agrippina. Imperial Rome is the backdrop for one of the composer’... Read more... |
Donnerstag aus Licht, Pascal, RFH review – indulgent genius at workWednesday, 22 May 2019
What happens on the stage of Stockhausen’s first opera would fill a book – quite a bad novel – but the plot is simple enough. Michael grows up with a domineering, game-hunting father and mentally unstable mother; discovers sex; passes his exams;... Read more... |
First Person: Conductor Maxime Pascal on Stockhausen at the Southbank CentreTuesday, 21 May 2019
Stockhausen stands alongside Monteverdi and Beethoven as a composer who exploded the understanding of his art. Stockhausen deeply changed the relationship between space, time and music; there’s a human, intimate dimension to his composition, and he... Read more... |
La Damnation de Faust, Glyndebourne review – bleak and compelling makeoverMonday, 20 May 2019
Mid-career, moving ever further away from composing for concert platform and church towards the stage, Berlioz found himself unsure where his take on Faust belonged. In the end he hedged his bets and titled it a "dramatic legend". Staging it as an... Read more... |
Phaedra, Linbury Theatre review - from confusing passion to blazing afterlifeFriday, 17 May 2019
Leaving a revival performance of Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a friend asked Hans Werner Henze, also in the audience, that dreaded question: "what did you think?" "Very competent and extremely well performed," came the answer. What snap... Read more... |
Semele, Monteverdi Choir, EBS, Gardiner, Alexandra Palace review - Handel's cornucopia lavishly servedFriday, 03 May 2019
Louise Alder, lyric soprano of the moment and vivacity incarnate, had yet to be born when John Eliot Gardiner made his first recording of Handel's Semele with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in 1981. Now they all come together to... Read more... |
