20 Jul 2017
The make-up is slapped on thickly in this new production of Leoncavallo’s Zazà by director Marie Lambert and designer Alyson Cummings at Investec Opera Holland Park. »
19 Jul 2017
David McVicar’s thrilling take on Verdi’s Rigoletto premiered as the first international production of this Summer’s Savonlinna Opera Festival. The scouts for the festival made the smart decision to let McVicar adapt his 2001 Covent Garden staging to the unique locale of Castle Olavinlinna.
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18 Jul 2017
The end of the ROH’s summer season was marked as usual by the Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance but this year’s showcase was a little lacklustre at times. »
17 Jul 2017
For the centenary of Finland’s Independence, the Savonlinna Opera Festival brought back Kari Heiskanen’s spectacular 1992 production of Aulis Salinen’s Kullervo. The excellent Finnish soloists and glorious choir unflinchingly offered this opera of vocal blood and guts. Conductor Hannu Lintu fired up the Savonlinna Opera Festival Orchestra in Sallinen’s thrilling music. »
17 Jul 2017
If there was any doubt of the insignificance of mankind in the face of the forces of Nature, then Yannis Thavoris’ design for Olivia Fuchs production of Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová - first seen at Investec Opera Holland Park in 2009 - would puncture it in a flash, figuratively and literally. »
16 Jul 2017
The bel canto repertoire requires stylish singing, with beautiful tone and elegant phrasing. Strength must be allied with grace in order to coast the vocal peaks with unflawed legato; flexibility blended with accuracy ensures the most bravura passages are negotiated with apparent ease. »
15 Jul 2017
Director Mariame Clément’s Don Pasquale, first seen during the 2011 tour and staged in the house in 2013, treads a fine line between realism and artifice. »
13 Jul 2017
It is hard to know where to begin to praise the peerless accomplishment that is Des Moines Metro Opera’s staggeringly powerful Billy Budd. »
11 Jul 2017
Romeo Castellucci’s aesthetic — if one may speak in the singular
— is very different from almost anything else on show in the opera house
at the moment. That, I have no doubt, is unquestionably a good thing.
Castellucci is a serious artist and it is all too easy for any of us to become
stuck in an artistic rut, congratulating ourselves not only on our
understanding but also, may God help us, our ‘taste’ —
as if so trivial a notion had something to do with anything other than
ourselves. »
11 Jul 2017
With Turandot, Des Moines Metro Opera operated from the premise of prima la voce, and if the no-holds-barred singing and rhapsodic playing didn’t send shivers down your spine, well, you were at the wrong address. »
11 Jul 2017
With an atmospheric, crackling performance of Astor Piazzolla’s Maria de Buenos Aires, Des Moines Metro Opera once again set off creative sparks with its Second Stage concept. »
11 Jul 2017
Schubert wrote Die schöne Müllerin (1824) for a tenor (or soprano) range - that of his own voice. Wilhelm Müller’s poems depict the youthful unsophistication of a country lad who, wandering with carefree unworldliness besides a burbling stream, comes upon a watermill, espies the miller’s fetching daughter and promptly falls in love - only to be disillusioned when she spurns him for a virile hunter. So, perhaps the tenor voice possesses the requisite combination of lightness and yearning to convey this trajectory from guileless innocence to disenchantment and dejection. »
11 Jul 2017
For my first trip to Finland, I flew from Helsinki to the east, close to the border of Russia near St. Petersburg over many of Suomi’s thousand lakes, where the summer getaway Savonlinna lays. Right after the solstice during July and early August, the town’s opera festival offers high quality productions. In this enchanting locale in the midst of peaceful nature, the sky at dusk after the mesmerising sunset fades away is worth the trip alone! »
11 Jul 2017
Bathed in Mediterranean light, basking in enlightenment Aix found two famous classical works, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in its famous festival’s open air Théâtre de l’Archevêche. But were we enlightened? »
10 Jul 2017
Des Moines Metro Opera’s richly detailed production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music left an appreciative audience to waltz home on air, and has prompted this viewer to search for adequate superlatives. »
10 Jul 2017
Of all the places, I did not expect a sublime Tristan und Isolde in a repurposed barn in the Cotswolds. Don’t be fooled by Longborough’s stage without lavish red curtains to open and close each act. Any opera house would envy the riveting chemistry between Peter Wedd and Lee Bisset in this intimate, 500 seat setting. Conductor Anthony Negus proved himself a master at Wagner’s emotional depth. Epic drama in minimalistic elegance: who needs a big budget when you have talent and drama this passionate? »
09 Jul 2017
For almost thirty years, summer at the Concertgebouw has been synonymous
with Robeco SummerNights. This popular series expands the classical concert
formula with pop, film music, jazz and more, served straight up or mixed
together. Composer Leonard Bernstein’s versatility makes his oeuvre,
ranging from Broadway to opera, prime SummerNight fare. »
09 Jul 2017
It was fascinating to see — and of course, to hear — Krzysztof
Warlikowsi’s productions of Die Gezeichneten and Die Frau
ohne Schatten on consecutive nights of this year’s Munich Opera
Festival. »
08 Jul 2017
Dulwich Opera Company’s Carmen was a convincingly successful show. This was mainly due to succinct musical direction and rigorous dramatic direction. It also meant that the proximity of the action was a fascinating treat, and by the artists being young, and easy on the eye. »
08 Jul 2017
There is a host of fine operas out there languishing more or less
unperformed (in some cases, quite unperformed). A few of them might even
qualify as ‘great’. (Feel free to remove inverted commas, should
that be your thing.) Franz Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, whatever
its proponents might claim, is certainly not one of those: not even close. »
08 Jul 2017
An incredible feat! The Aix Festival opened five operas, all new productions, on five consecutive evenings. The fifth was Francesco Cavalli’s 1655 drama per musica, Erismena! The compulsive intellectualism of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (1643) long since thrown in the canals, Cavalli dissolves Venetian opera into purest, mindless hedonism. »
07 Jul 2017
Andrei Serban’s 1984 production of Turandot has returned to the Royal Opera House, for its sixteenth revival, and it remains a visual feast. The principals’ raw silk costumes, intricately embroidered and patterned, splash vibrant primary hues against the shadowy tiers which house the red-masked Chorus to the rear. »
05 Jul 2017
Fidelio is a great opera, but not an easy one to
perform. Much of the music is stirring, including some among the most
profoundly moving passages in all opera. The revolutionary political idealism
that underlies the opera is inspiring, particularly to those in German-speaking
lands, where it inspires reverence. »
05 Jul 2017
There were four simultaneous Carmen — those of Prosper Merimee, Georges Bizet, Dimitri Tcherniakov and Pablo Heras-Casado. »
04 Jul 2017
Back to the operatic days when the book took top billing and the composer's name was in the fine print. Collodi’s tale is an epic journey wrapped in sophisticated innocence that leaves you probably more disgusted than anything else — Collodi’s Pinocchio is not a charming child. »
04 Jul 2017
Franz Schreker Die Gezeichneten from the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, conducted by Ingo Metzmacher, easily the most rewarding full performance ever. Metzmacher gets Schreker - revealing his modernity and originality. There are many kinds of "modern". The idea that 20th-century music can only be atonal/tonal, or dissonant /romantic, is nonsense in itself. Schreker was a highly original composer, very much a man attuned to the creative ferment of his time, fuelled as it was by new ideas and social change. »
03 Jul 2017
There can hardly be a dry eye in the house, at the ‘Theatre in the Woods’ at West Horsley Place - Grange Park Opera’s new home - when, in Act 3 of Janáček's first mature opera, Natalya Romaniw’s Jenůfa realises that the tiny child whose frozen body has been discovered under the ice is her own dead son. »
02 Jul 2017
WNO’s summer tour of Joachim Herz’s 1978 production of Madame Butterfly, revived by Sarah Crisp, arrived at the Birmingham Hippodrome this week. A ‘traditional’ assemblage of raised dwellings and sliding Shoji screens, Reinhart Zimmermann’s sepia set evokes the dulling of oriental grace by Western mundanity. For the dull taupe curtains which frame the sides and room of the set drape their traditional sprinkling of willow and bamboo like a bleached Hokusai wave. The effect is suffocating, blocking out any sense of a world outside Cio-Cio-San’s abode. »
02 Jul 2017
Time, sands, mists: all slip through one’s fingers - intangible and irretrievable. Olivia Fuchs’ production of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier for WNO communicates the opera’s message in a clear visual narrative of subtlety and dramatic eloquence. »
01 Jul 2017
One might expect a satire on sexual stereotypes penned in 1917 to feel a bit dated in 2017. But, in these days of gender fluidity, with science making biological choice a free-for-all, and with Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale having just hit US and UK television screens, Poulenc’s gender-bending Les mamelles de Tirésias - based on Apollinaire’s surrealist play and first seen at the Opera Comique in 1947 - proved a timely choice for the first half of RCM’s summer double bill. »
27 Jun 2017
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis knew to trust the surefire potential of Madame Butterfly, and pretty much stayed out of its way. »
27 Jun 2017
If opera is to remain a viable, accessible 21st century art form, it will be largely owing to the commitment of visionary companies like Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. »
27 Jun 2017
Mozart’s opera seria, La Clemenza di Tito, performed in English at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis did something I did not think possible. »