Opera
Das Rheingold, Royal Opera review - high drama and dark comedyTuesday, 25 September 2018
Keith Warner’s production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen was first seen at Covent Garden between 2004 and 2006, and is now back for a third and final series of full runs, chiefly to catch the Brünnhilde of Nina Stemme in three of the operas,... Read more... |
Isouard's Cendrillon, Bampton Classical Opera review - stepsisters shine in fairy-tale bagatelleWednesday, 19 September 2018
Cinderella as opera in French: of late, the palm has always gone to Massenet's adorable (as in a-dor-Ah-bler) confection, and it should again soon when Glyndebourne offers a worthy home to the master's magic touch. The Cendrillon of Maltese-born... Read more... |
Parsifal, Saffron Opera Group review - drama and focusTuesday, 18 September 2018
It is a pleasure to report on the continuing success of the Saffron Opera Wagner project. The organisation was formed in 2013, and since then has presented concert performances of the Ring cycle and Meistersinger, and now Parsifal, all with an... Read more... |
War and Peace, Welsh National Opera review - an Operation Barbarossa that comes offMonday, 17 September 2018
What lunatic would ever have the idea of turning War and Peace into an opera? Well, maybe if you, a composer, had found yourself in Moscow in June 1941 when news of the German invasion reached the Soviet capital, you might have decided to mount an... Read more... |
Tosca, Opera North review - exciting update, strong on sonic thrillsMonday, 17 September 2018
Puccini’s Tosca isn’t a subtle work, and this, Opera North’s fourth production since the company’s founding in 1978, is occasionally too loud and crude. But it’s undeniably powerful. Edward Dick’s 2017 Hansel and Gretel left me a little... Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, British Youth Opera review - perfect poise in slippery StravinskyFriday, 07 September 2018
So it's been sellouts for half-baked if well-cast productions of The Rake's Progress and now Britten's Paul Bunyan at Wilton's Music Hall, while British Youth Opera's classy Stravinsky in the admittedly larger Peacock Theatre, several hundred yards... Read more... |
Prom 71, DiDonato, Tamestit, ORR, Gardiner review - concert Berlioz as bracing theatreThursday, 06 September 2018
How do you make your mark in a crucial last week after the Olympian spectaculars of Kirill Petrenko's Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic? Well, for a start, you stay true to recent principles by getting as many of your period-instrument Orchestre... Read more... |
Paul Bunyan, ENO, Wilton's Music Hall review - talent cabined and confinedWednesday, 05 September 2018
It's Britten outside-in time for English National Opera. Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which played host earlier this year to an only partially convincing production of his 1950s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, would have been the perfect... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Suoni dal Golfo Festival - romantics shine in the Bay of PoetsMonday, 03 September 2018
If only Liszt had started at the end of his Byron-inspired opera Sardanapalo. The mass immolation of Assyrian concubines might have been something to compare with the end of Wagner's Götterdämmerung. Instead he only sketched out the first act,... Read more... |
'I wanted a juke box that plays nothing but flip-sides' - Jeremy Sams on The Enchanted IslandWednesday, 22 August 2018
I have many files, in bulging boxes and dusty corners of my computer, of projects that, for whatever reason, never came to fruition. To be honest I’ve forgotten most of them. And I wrongly assumed that The Enchanted Island would be one of those... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Itinéraire Baroque 2018 - canaries in front of a Périgord altarMonday, 20 August 2018
Brits are the folk you expect to encounter the most in the rural-England-on-steroids of the beautiful Dordogne. In my experience they outnumber the French, at least in high summer, not just as visitors and retired homeowners but also as artisans... Read more... |
Greed as the keynote: Robert Carsen on the timelessness of 'The Beggar's Opera'Tuesday, 14 August 2018
In the time of composer John Gay, greed and self-interest were the main motives for life; and his work The Beggar’s Opera is an open critique on the way that society behaved. The work’s opening number sets the tone, basically saying: “we all abuse... Read more... |
