Performances

05 Oct 2020

ETO Autumn 2020 Season Announcement: Lyric Solitude

English Touring Opera are delighted to announce a season of lyric monodramas to tour nationally from October to December. The season features music for solo singer and piano by Argento, Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich with a bold and inventive approach to making opera during social distancing. »

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15 Mar 2009

Don Giovanni — Victorian Opera

Each Australia state maintains its own opera company. The dominant company is Opera Australia, a permanent ensemble based at the Sydney Opera House but which originated in the Melbourne based National Theatre Opera Company in the 1940s.  »

15 Mar 2009

LA “Ring” up and running

LOS ANGELES: On February 21 the capacity audience in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was overwhelmed by the staging of Das Rheingold that launched the Los Angeles Opera’s new production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. So was Wagner. »

15 Mar 2009

Haydn’s L’Isola Disabitata by Gotham Chamber Opera

Had a misunderstanding with your truelove lately? Tough job straightening things out?  »

15 Mar 2009

Wagner’s Das Rheingold at Los Angeles Opera

There is some slim irony to an opera company pursuing the complicated business of staging Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the current economy — it entails the very sort of dubious compromises that get Wotan and crew into such hot water (if one assumes the cataclysmic fire at the end of Götterdämmerung heated the Rhine).  »

08 Mar 2009

Tristan und Isolde in Chicago

By the close of the first act of Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in its current production at Lyric Opera of Chicago the audience has been given a strong impression of the multi-faceted characters bound up in the musical drama unfolding on stage.  »

08 Mar 2009

Fidelio — London Lyric Opera, Cadogan Hall

After a problematic debut last Autumn with Der fliegende Holländer at the Barbican, London’s newest opera-in-concert outfit returned this month with Fidelio at the smaller Cadogan Hall. »

08 Mar 2009

Korngold Thrills in Venice

It is not often that the team of stage director, set and costume designer get the biggest, most boisterously rowdy roar of approval at opera's end. »

05 Mar 2009

Dr Atomic lands on London with a bang

To say that Dr Atomic landed in London with a bang is shocking, but the subject it deals with is meant to be disturbing. Unlike the scientists at Los Alamos, we can’t live in denial of the wider implications. This isn’t history. It’s a universal dilemma, utterly relevant today.  »

05 Mar 2009

La bohème — English National Opera

Jonathan Miller's new production of Puccini's wintry opera was denied its planned opening night on Monday 2nd February by a bout of unusually heavy snow which brought most of London's transport services to a halt and turned it into a virtual ghost town (thus, up the road at Covent Garden, the cancellation of a performance of Korngold's 'Die tote Stadt' was equally ironic). »

05 Mar 2009

Janáček's Šárka at Dicapo Opera

There is a visceral pleasure in hearing so many healthy sets of young lungs tearing into this music, and they do sing, they do not bellow. »

27 Feb 2009

A restrained Flying Dutchman at the Royal Opera House, London

This Der fliegende Holländer was eagerly awaited as it hasn’t been heard at the Royal Opera House, London, since 2000. With Bryn Terfel’s return to Covent Garden as the Dutchman guaranteed a full house. »

27 Feb 2009

Lucrezia Borgia at Munich

Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia, his 30th opera, is based on Victor Hugo’s play of the same name, and had its premiere at La Scala in 1833.  »

25 Feb 2009

Rigoletto at the MET

The Plague of Beautiful Sounds: Has Bel Canto gone too far? »

25 Feb 2009

Adriana Lecouvreur at the MET

There come nights in the opera season where gesamtkunstwerke won’t do — enough of epic masterpieces and supreme lyric outpourings of the human spirit!  »

25 Feb 2009

Frankfurt: Thinking Inside the Box

My heart didn't exactly leap in joyful anticipation as I entered the Frankfurt Opera and saw the Arabella pre-set on stage: a big, shallow, white box.  »

24 Feb 2009

No Home for Heroes at the Theater an der Wien, Vienna — Pierre Audi’s new production of Handel’s Partenope.

Handel operas are like London buses — you wait for ages and then 3 come along together.  »

22 Feb 2009

Massenet's Don Quichotte at San Diego Opera

Ferrucio Furlanetto apparently loves the temperate climes of San Diego in California's equivalent of late winter.  »

10 Feb 2009

Chicago’s Lyric brings life to Tristan

Superlatives were in short supply when the curtain fell on Tristan und Isolde at Chicago Lyric Opera on January 27.  »

08 Feb 2009

Magic Flute at ENO

‘Back by popular demand’ claimed ENO’s publicity material for the 21-year-old production which had its supposed swan-song last season – though it remains questionable whether the company ever really intended to get rid of it.  »

08 Feb 2009

Die tote Stadt, Royal Opera House

Die tote Stadt is Korngold’s masterpiece in the old sense of the word, when a craftsman would produce a dazzling work to show the world what he could do. This is Korngold’s manifesto, so to speak.  »

08 Feb 2009

Eugene Onegin at the MET

Pushkin’s poem Eugene Onegin is the first of the great line of Russian novels, passionately loved by all the literate of that most literary nation.  »

08 Feb 2009

Poaching in Cologne

One definition of “poach” is “to take or appropriate something unfairly.” »

08 Feb 2009

Brussels’ Definitive Death

Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie / De Munt started 2009 by serving up a real New Year's treat for the Belgian capital's opera enthusiasts: a near-perfect staging of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice. »

01 Feb 2009

Partenope in Ferrara

The Greek princes Arsace (alto) and Armindo (alto) are seeking handsome Queen Partenope (soprano), who has just founded the city of Naples, in marriage.  »

27 Jan 2009

Amsterdam Hercules Dazzlingly In Love

I had never personally imagined mythical Hercules as a WWF Wrestler-cum-Caveman but damn if Dutch National Opera's staging of Francesco Cavalli's Ercole Amante didn't almost persuade me it could be so. »

26 Jan 2009

Pfitzner's Palestrina at Bavarian State Opera

Writer Jens F. Laurson reports from Munich, where a new staging of Hans Pfitzner's Palestrina opened Jan. 19 at the National Theater. The rarely-performed 1917 three-act opera stars Christopher Ventris in the title role. »

19 Jan 2009

Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra by NYCO

The two performances of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra given at Carnegie Hall — the New York City Opera’s only performances this year while the State Theater is in rehab and the company is in flux — may or may not prove to be swan song of New York’s gallant number two company, whose succession of identity crises have been so fascinating to observe — and hear — over the decades.  »

07 Jan 2009

La Rondine at the MET

The first thing that hits you about the Met’s production of La Rondine is the beauty of the sets and costumes (from the classy team of Ezio Frigerio and Franca Squarciapino, respectively) — especially in contrast to the tawdry glitz of the recent Thaïs.  »

26 Dec 2008

Thaïs at the MET

Everyone who likes Massenet’s Thaïs seems to feel obliged to apologize for it, or to become defensive: it’s not that bad, they all seem to say.  »

23 Dec 2008

The Play of Daniel — A Medieval Music Drama from Beauvais

Can we call The Play of Daniel an opera, or “music drama” (as this performance put it), when such terms did not exist, and would not exist for centuries to come when the piece was devised, around 1200, by the cathedral chapter of Beauvais?  »

22 Dec 2008

Berg’s Lulu at Lyric Opera of Chicago

In its new production this fall season of Alban Berg’s Lulu, Lyric Opera of Chicago has achieved a near ideal synthesis of music and drama.  »

22 Dec 2008

Hänsel and Gretel at Covent Garden

Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel is titled a Märchenspiel — a Fairytale: and as twentieth-century psychologists and psychoanalysts have been eager to inform us, lurking beneath those familiar saccharine stories of sleeping princesses, defeated tyrants, love fulfilled and harmony restored, lie the dark shadows of the human heart — passionate, violent, unpredictable and unredeemed. »

22 Dec 2008

Thaïs: A Star Vehicle — In Overdrive

The Metropolitan Opera’s high-definition broadcast on radio and by satellite to movie theatres around the Nation, December 20 was Jules Massent’s 1894 star vehicle, Thaïs — the sadly ironic tale of a 4th Century Egyptian courtesan who grows tired of the long hours and demanding nature of her work, and is thinking of a career change.  »

14 Dec 2008

Riders to the Sea — English National Opera, London Coliseum

Back in June, in my review of The Pilgrim’s Progress at Sadler’s Wells, I wrote about the valuable and unsurpassed work being done by Richard Hickox to champion the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams in the composer’s centenary year, a project of which this rare staging of Riders to the Sea for ENO was to be the culmination.  »

12 Dec 2008

Der Fliegende Holländer — London Lyric Opera, Barbican Hall

Much has been promised of London Lyric Opera. The newest company on the capital’s opera scene, it will collaborate with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to specialise in full-scale concert performances with high-profile soloists.  »

11 Dec 2008

When Water Sprites Go Bad in Brussels

Brussels’ reliably excellent De Munt/La Monnaie Opera served up a Rusalka that was theatrically vivid, musically resplendent, and cheered to the rafters at its premiere.  »

08 Dec 2008

Elektra, Avery Fisher Hall, New York

Elektra begins with an explosion and remains, with a few lyric interludes, on that extreme pitch throughout its two hours.  »

07 Dec 2008

Glyndebourne on Tour — Theatre Royal, Plymouth

Glyndebourne Touring Opera has long been bringing its wares to the further reaches of the southern United Kingdom and its current package of Hansel und Gretel, Carmen and The Magic Flute has been drawing good crowds from Norwich in the east to Plymouth in the south-west. »

05 Dec 2008

Tristan und Isolde at the MET

The bad luck of last season’s Tristans seems to be edging into the present one — but the curse now finds the house better prepared for trouble.  »

05 Dec 2008

Barcelona: Figaro la, Figaro qua

Like Seville’s peripatetic barber, Gran Teatro del Liceu's new Marriage of Figaro is rather all over the place. »

02 Dec 2008

Porgy through a glass lightly

It was, of course, coincidence. When the Chicago Lyric Opera scheduled George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for the current season, not even the preludes to the 2008 presidential election had begun.  »

02 Dec 2008

Munich's Christmas Treasures: Massenet and Handel

Not all of Munich's holiday delights are to be found at the just-opened annual Christmas Market filling the Marienplatz and environs.  »

01 Dec 2008

Carmen at the Washington National Opera

From the director’s point of view, there are two ways to approach staging an opera.  »

28 Nov 2008

The Tales of Hoffmann at Covent Garden

The opening performance of the ROH’s seventh revival of John Schlesinger’s 1980 production of The Tales of Hoffmann was dedicated to the memory of Richard Hickox.  »

25 Nov 2008

Debussy’s Pelléas - a fine swansong for Independent Opera in London

Pelléas et Mélisande in a 200 seat theatre, with just 35 musicians and no pit?  »

25 Nov 2008

Boris Godunov at ENO

There are two things which, in recent history, English National Opera has consistently done extremely well.  »

25 Nov 2008

La Bohème in San Francisco

The show curtain was an illustration of the typical Parisian skyline.  »