Opera
Wagner at the Proms rememberedSunday, 08 September 2013
This summer, the Royal Albert Hall became the centre of the Wagnerian universe. No one was going to ignore Bayreuth, where Frank Castorf‘s new Ring gave plenty of fuel for column inches; but somehow the singers and the orchestra seem to have got... Read more... |
Anna Bolena, Welsh National OperaSunday, 08 September 2013
“Let the florid music praise,” sing Britten and Auden in their On This Island cycle; and I suppose we must do as we’re told, though aesthetic duty can be a hard taskmaster. For me it cracks its whip in the three Donizetti operas that, inexplicably,... Read more... |
Prom 72: Calleja, Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi, ZhangFriday, 06 September 2013
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese... Read more... |
Prom 60: Billy Budd, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, DavisWednesday, 28 August 2013
You may well ask whether theartsdesk hasn’t already exhausted all there is to say about Glyndebourne’s most celebrated Britten production of recent years. I gave it a more cautious welcome than most on its first airing, troubled a little by the... Read more... |
Prom 57: Parsifal, Hallé, ElderMonday, 26 August 2013
So for one last time this season the impossible colosseum of Albertopolis became the Wagnerian holiest of holies – to be precise, the Cathedral of the Holy Grail - and once again I fell in love with the beast transfigured. Justin Way, the one artist... Read more... |
Paul Bunyan, Welsh National Youth Opera, CardiffSaturday, 24 August 2013
Reading through WH Auden’s libretto for Britten’s first stage work – the so-called operetta Paul Bunyan – it’s sometimes hard to decide whether the intention was to participate in the great American dream or to make fun of it. In 1941 both artists... Read more... |
Prom 45: The Midsummer Marriage, BBC Symphony Orchestra, DavisSaturday, 17 August 2013
Jeremy Paxman’s beard may have been a wonder and a talking point for five days, but Michael Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage beats it by almost 60 years. Ecstatic, visionary, energetic music, yes indeed. But, oh, the composer’s libretto! The... Read more... |
Fidelio, Opéra de Lyon, Festival Theatre, EdinburghTuesday, 13 August 2013
When first seen at Serge Dorny’s Opéra de Lyon in March-April this year, American Gary Hill’s unusual vision of Beethoven’s Fidelio could be recognised immediately as concept opera: drama where a director’s “idea” largely takes over the story. Hill... Read more... |
Opinion: When artists could speak outMonday, 12 August 2013
Take note of the title, with its “could”, not “must”. “The word ‘must’ is not to be used to Princes,” quoth Good Queen Bess as echoed in Britten’s Gloriana. Yet that was the verb used by New York writer Scott Rose, guest-posting on Norman Lebrecht’s... Read more... |
Billy Budd, Glyndebourne Festival OperaSunday, 11 August 2013
It’s not a crowd-pleaser like Albert Herring, nor wittily fanciful like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or macabre like The Turn of the Screw and certainly not the classic that Peter Grimes has become, and until three years ago Glyndebourne had never even... Read more... |
'O what have I done?'Thursday, 08 August 2013
“O what have I done, o what, what have I done? Confusion, so much is confusion.” So sings Captain Vere in the Prologue of Billy Budd and Benjamin Britten plunges us straight into this confusion from the very first bar as we are left in uncertainty... Read more... |
Prom 29: Tannhäuser, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, RunniclesMonday, 05 August 2013
On the one occasion I went to Bayreuth, I made the mistake of seeing The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin after the best of Ring cycles. At the Proms we’ve had a week of serious Wagnerian withdrawal symptoms, so Tannhäuser was never going to feel like... Read more... |
