17 Aug 2019
Sea Pictures: both the name of Elgar’s five-song cycle for contralto and orchestra, performed at this BBC Prom by Catriona Morison, winner of the Cardiff Singer of the World Main Prize in 2017, and a fitting title for this whole concert by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Elim Chan, which juxtaposed a first half of songs of the sea, fair and fraught, with, post-interval, compositions inspired by paintings. »
16 Aug 2019
As much as the Proms strives to stand above the events of its time, that doesn’t mean the musicians, conductors or composers who perform there should necessarily do so. »
11 Aug 2019
Site-specific operas are commonplace these days, but at The Octagon Barn in Norwich, Genevieve Raghu, founder and Artistic Director of Into Opera, contrived to make a site persuasively opera-specific. »
09 Aug 2019
Nathalie Stutzmann really is an impressive conductor. The sheer elegance she brings to her formidable technique, the effortless drive towards making much of the music she conducts sound so passionate and the ability to shock us into hearing something quite new in music we think we know is really rather refreshing. Why then did this Prom sometimes feel weary, even disappointing at times? »
06 Aug 2019
Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer have become an indispensable presence in the contemporary opera world, and their latest premiere, If I Were You, found the duo at the very top of their game. »
05 Aug 2019
Santa Fe Opera continues its remarkable record for producing World (and American) Premieres with The Thirteenth Child, music by Poul Ruders, libretto by Becky and David Starobin. »
05 Aug 2019
Among classical music lovers, Wagner inspires equal measures of devotion and disdain. Some travel far and sit for hours to hear his operas live. Others eschew them completely. »
03 Aug 2019
And still they come. The opera world’s obsession with Handel’s operas shows no sign of abating. The Bavarian State Opera has, since Peter Jonas’s Intendancy, stood at the forefront of Handel staging; this new production of Agrippina was dedicated to him. As ever, I was pleased to see one of these operas for the first time in the theatre – how could I not be pleased to see almost anything in Munich’s wonderful Prinzregententheater – but again, as ever, I was left unable ever quite to put to one side the dramaturgical difficulties/problems/flaws/inadequacies. (Call them what you will.) »
03 Aug 2019
Benjamin Britten’s early, brilliant Piano Concerto and Gustav Mahler’s late symphonic song-cycle Das Lied von der Erde might seem strange concert partners, but there are links between the two works. Both have an uncertainty of form, Britten’s concerto is almost a suite, whilst Mahler’s song-cycle is effectively a symphony. Also, both works were introduced into the UK by Sir Henry Wood. It is this latter connection which drew Britten’s Piano Concerto and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde into Thursday night’s Prom as part of this year’s celebration the 150th anniversary of Sir Henry Wood’s birth. »
01 Aug 2019
Graham Vick and Jonathan Dove's adaptation of Wagner's Ring was created in the early 1990s for Vick's City of Birmingham Touring Opera, reducing the four evenings and 15 hours music of the cycle down to just two evenings. Dove's orchestration skilfully reduced Wagner's demands down to just 18 instrumentalists, thus allowing a touring version of the Ring (done by Vick in an imaginative production which remarkably followed most of Wagner's stage directions) sung by younger voices. »
01 Aug 2019
‘Es klang so neu und war doch ein bißchen alt’? »
31 Jul 2019
Many Puccini cognoscenti will speak of La fanciulla del West as Puccini’s finest opera - or at least his most musically interesting. In the latter case, I think I can hear what they mean, even if I do not agree. I continue to struggle, with the former claim, although this performance at the Munich Opera Festival made the most convincing case I have yet heard for the work. Its virtues were predominantly musical, in keeping with the work’s general valuation. »
31 Jul 2019
The enchanting grounds of West Green House in the heart of rural Hampshire offer the ideal venue for Rossini’s fairy-tale-based opera, La Cenerentola. Glass side panels bring the 400-seater auditorium’s leafy surroundings a little closer and heighten the impact of a derelict Renault and no less shabby looking Land Rover that front the stage with a boldness redolent of Banksy’s ‘Monet with Shopping Trolley’. »
30 Jul 2019
This lunchtime Prom at Cadogan Hall celebrated the 400th anniversary of the Venetian singer, composer and poet, Barbara Strozzi, but it might equally have been announced as a tribute to the musical form which underpinned so much of the exquisite invention and rhetoric during Strozzi’s era - the circular bass pattern of the ground, chaconne and passacaglia. »
28 Jul 2019
Des Moines Metro Opera closed their wholly winning 47th festival season with a wondrously sung, theatrical vivid, and emotionally bewitching treatment of
Puccini’s evergreen masterpiece, La bohème. »
27 Jul 2019
The version of Bernstein’s and (too-many-collaborators-to-mention) Candide that inhabited the Des Moines Metro Opera festival had a great deal to recommend it.
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27 Jul 2019
If any further proof were needed that Des Moines Metro Opera is at the forefront of operatic excellence in America, their theatrically searing, musically impeccable Wozzeck would cement this assertion. »
25 Jul 2019
Des Moines Metro Opera delights in coming up with site-specific operatic presentations, and Bon Appetit was triumphantly produced in the handsome hall of the Iowa Culinary Institute. »
24 Jul 2019
Where might you hear medieval monophony by the late 12th-century French composer Pérotin, Renaissance polyphony by William Byrd, a vocal arrangement of the stirring theme from Sibelius’s tone poem Finlandia, alongside a newly commissioned work, ‘Vertue’ (2019) by Jonathan Dove, followed by an arrangement of the Irish folksong ‘Danny Boy’ and a snappy rendition of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s ‘One Note Samba’ arr. for eight voices by Naomi Crellin, all within 90 minutes? »
24 Jul 2019
In an essay published in 1868, Tolstoy wrote: ‘What is War and Peace? It is not a novel, still less a poem, still less a historical chronicle. War and Peace is that which the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it has been expressed.’ »
23 Jul 2019
If you need a sweet bonbon to accompany the canapés and champagne on a sparkling summer evening, then Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari’s one-act trifle is a safe bet, especially if presented, as at Opera Holland Park by director John Wilkie and designer takis, as a confection of pink and purple, and performed by two splendid singing actors. »
22 Jul 2019
This year’s Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance offered a veritable operatic smörgåsbord, presenting sizable excerpts from operas ranging from Gluck to Saint-Saëns, from Mozart to Debussy, by way of some Italian masterpieces, courtesy of Rossini and Verdi. »
21 Jul 2019
In a rank order of suicidal depressives, Federico - the Provençal peasant besotted with ‘the woman from Arles’, L’arlesiana, who yearns to break free from his mother’s claustrophobic grasp, who seeks solace from betrayal and disillusionment in the arms of a patient childhood sweetheart, but who is ultimately broken by deluded dreams and unrequited passion - would surely give many a Thomas Hardy protagonist a run for their money. »
20 Jul 2019
The young American conductor Karina Canellakis made history as the first woman to conduct the First Night of the Proms last night (19 July 2019) as she conducted the BBC Singers, BBC Symphony Chorus and BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall with soloists Asmik Grigorian (soprano), Jennifer Johnston (mezzo-soprano), Ladislav Elgr (tenor), Jan Martiník (bass) and Peter Holder (organ) in Zosha Di Castri's Long is the Journey, Short Is the Memory (the world premiere of a BBC commission), Antonin Dvořák’s The Golden Spinning Wheel and Leoš Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass. »
19 Jul 2019
No one would pretend that Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto for Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte would go down well with the #MeToo generation. Or with first, second or third wave feminists for that matter. »
17 Jul 2019
Along with the celestial Mozart Requiem, a doomed Tosca and a gloriously witty Mahagonny the Aix Festival’s new artistic director Pierre Audi regaled us with three chamber operas — the premiere of a brilliant Les Mille Endormis, the technically playful Blank Out (on a turgid subject), and a heavy-duty Jakob Lenz. »
12 Jul 2019
French soprano Sabine Devieilhe seems to find feisty adolescence a neat fit. I first encountered her when she assumed the role of a pill-popping nightclubbing ‘Beauty’ - raced from ecstasy-induced wonder to emergency ward - when I reviewed the DVD of Krzysztof Warlikowski’s production of Handel’s Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno at Aix-en-Provence in 2016. »
12 Jul 2019
Make no mistake, this is about you! Jim laid-out dead on the stage floor, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen brought his very loud orchestra (London’s Philharmonia) to an abrupt halt. Black out. The maestro then turned his spotlighted face to confront us and he held his stare. There was no mistake, the music was about us. »
11 Jul 2019
There was a full house at Wigmore Hall for Classical Opera’s/The Mozartists’ final concert of the 2018-19 season: a musical paysage which chartered, largely chronologically, Mozart’s youthful travels from London to The Hague, on to Paris, then Rome, concluding - following stop-overs in European cultural cities such as Munich and Vienna - with an arrival at his final destination, Prague. »
09 Jul 2019
From the sublime — the Mozart Requiem — to the ridiculous, namely stage director Christophe Honoré's Tosca. A ridiculous waste of operatic resources.
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08 Jul 2019
One might describe Christopher Oram’s set for Louisa Muller’s new production of The Turn of the Screw at Garsington as ‘shabby chic’
if it wasn’t so sinister. »
08 Jul 2019
Pierre Audi, now the directeur général of the Festival d’Aix as well as the artistic director of New York City’s Park Avenue Armory opens a new era for this distinguished opera festival in the south of France with a new work by the Festival’s signature composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. »