01 Jul 2018
There is something very Danish about this Don Giovanni. It isn’t just that the director, Kasper Holten is a Dane, it’s also that the existential, moral and psychological questions Holten asks point to Kierkegaard who wrote of the fusion of the erotic and demonic in this opera in his work Either/Or (1843). However, I’ve rarely, if ever, encountered a production of Don Giovanni - even Bieito’s notorious one for ENO - where Mozart comes off as second best. »
01 Jul 2018
Schoenberg Gurrelieder at the Royal Festival Hall, with Esa-Pekka Salonen, demonstrating how well the Philharmonia Orchestra has absorbed Schoenberg's idiom. A blazing performance, formidably dramatic, executed with stunning assurance. Salonen has made his mark on the Philharmonia through in-depth explorations of the 20th century repertoire he loves so well. »
30 Jun 2018
London may have been basking in the golden glow of summer sunshine this week, but things have been darkly gothic on the capital’s opera scene. »
29 Jun 2018
There was a palpable anticipatory buzz in the audience well before one note was heard of Pacific Opera Project’s adventurous take on Rossini’s seldom staged La Gazzetta (The Newspaper). »
29 Jun 2018
Dangerous Liasions with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Joined by Les Corps Éloquents (Hubert Hazebrouq, choreographer, Irène Feste and Romain Arreghini), the OAE surpassed even their own high standards, demonstrating the link between music and dance in the French baroque. »
27 Jun 2018
Six years ago composer George Benjamin and playwright Martin Crimp gave the
world Written on Skin. It caused a sensation at its unveiling at
the Aix-en-Provence Festival. Hot on the heels of its world premiere at the
Royal Opera House in London, the composer is now conducting their second
full-length opera, Lessons in Love and Violence, at the Holland
Festival, where he is this year’s Composer in Focus. »
26 Jun 2018
In the second scene, ‘The Welcome’, of Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, the Governess arrives at her employer’s country house, Bly, to take charge of her two new tutees, and sings, “Bly, I begin to love you
For Bly is now my home”. Later, she declares, “I too am home. Alone, tranquil and serene.” It’s difficult to imagine a less homely, tranquil and serene dwelling place than the cracked and crooked glass-house which forms the single set for English National Opera’s new production of The Turn of the Screw, and which marks a new association between the company and Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. »
25 Jun 2018
Those for whom opera is primarily a matter of fine singing will have had a treat in this Entführung. In that sense, so did I. The Grange Festival had assembled a cast to grace any stage, a cast that more than lived up to expectations on this, the first night. »
24 Jun 2018
Opera seems to travel far from the opera house these days. Alongside numerous productions in community spaces and pub theatres, in the last few years I’ve enjoyed productions staged on the shingle shore of Aldeburgh beach, at the bottom of the shaft of Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Thames Tunnel at Rotherhithe, and in a renovated warehouse in Shoreditch on the roof of which perch four ‘creative studios’ in the form of recycled Jubilee line train carriages and shipping containers. »
23 Jun 2018
The truly tragic moments of this long history rich in humanity behind us we embark on the sordid tale of the Lord of the Gibichungs’s marriage to Brünnhilde and the cowardly murder of Siegfried, to arrive at some sort of conclusion where Brünnhilde sacrifices herself to somehow empower women. Or something. »
23 Jun 2018
We discover the child of incestuous love, we ponder a god’s confusion, we anticipate an awakening. Most of all we marvel at genius of the composer and admire the canny story telling of the Zambello production. »
23 Jun 2018
Yes, just when you thought Wotan was the only big guy in town San Francisco Symphony (just across a small street from San Francisco Opera), offered three staged performances of the Mussorgsky masterpiece Boris Godunov in direct competition with San Francisco Opera’s three Ring des Nibelungen cycles. »
19 Jun 2018
Bruno Ravella’s new production of Verdi's Falstaff for Garsington Opera eschews Elizabethan pomp in favour of Edwardian pompousness, and in so doing places incipient, insurgent feminism and the eternal class consciousness of fin de siècle English polite society centre stage. »
18 Jun 2018
The Italian censors forced Giuseppe Verdi and his librettist Antonio Somma to relocate their operatic drama of the murder of the Swedish King Gustav III to Boston, demote the monarch to state governor and rename him Riccardo, and for their production of Un ballo in maschera at Grange Park Opera, director Stephen Medcalf and designer Jamie Vartan have left the ‘ruler’ in his censorial exile. »
17 Jun 2018
When I reviewed Covent Garden’s Tosca back in January, I came very close to suggesting that we might be entering a period of crisis in casting the great Puccini operas. Fast forward six months, and what a world of difference! »
16 Jun 2018
Let me begin, like an undergraduate unsure quite what to say at the beginning of an essay: there were many reasons to admire the first performance of Na’ama Zisser’s opera, Mamzer Bastard, a co-commission from the Royal Opera and the Guildhall. »
14 Jun 2018
At the Barbican, London, Les Arts Florissants conducted by Paul Agnew, with soloists of Le Jardin de Voix in "An English Garden" a semi-staged programme of English baroque. »
14 Jun 2018
The hero Siegfried in utero, Siegmund dead, Wotan humiliated, Brünnhilde asleep, San Francisco’s Ring ripped relentlessly into the shredded emotional lives of its gods and mortals. Conductor Donald Runnicles laid bare Richard Wagner’s score in its most heroic and in its most personal revelations, in their intimacy and in their exploding release.
»
13 Jun 2018
Alberich’s ring forged, the gods moved into Valhalla, Loge’s Bic flicked, Wagner’s cumbersome nineteenth century mythology began unfolding last night here in Bayreuth-by-the-Bay. »
13 Jun 2018
The shepherds and nymphs are at play! It’s end-of-the-year office-party time in Elysium. The bean-bags, balloons and banners - ‘Work Hard, Play Harder’ - invite the weary workers of Mountain Media to let their hair down, and enter the ‘Groves of Delights and Crystal Fountains’. »
12 Jun 2018
Since returning to London in January, I have been heartened by much of what I have seen - and indeed heard - from the Royal Opera. »
10 Jun 2018
Another wonderful Wigmore song recital: this time from Stéphane Degout
– recently shining in George Benjamin's new operatic masterpiece, »
10 Jun 2018
‘How beautiful it is to love! But even more beautiful is freedom!’ The opening lines of the libretto of Mozart’s La finta semplice are as contradictory as the unfolding tale is ridiculous. Either that master of comedy, Carlo Goldoni, was having an off-day when he penned the text - which was performed during the Carnival of 1764 in the Teatro Giustiniani di S. Moisè in Venice with music by Salvatore Perillo - or Marco Coltellini, the poeta cesareo who was entertaining the Viennese aristocracy in 1768, took unfortunate liberties with poetry and plot. »
08 Jun 2018
‘We love singing songs, telling stories
’ profess The Prince Consort on their website, and this carefully curated programme at Wigmore Hall perfectly embodied this passion, as Artistic Director and pianist Alisdair Hogarth was joined by tenor Andrew Staples (the Consort’s Creative Director), Verity Wingate (soprano) and poet Laura Mucha to reflect on ‘whatever love is’. »
07 Jun 2018
It had been a while since Bryn Terfel sang a complete opera role in
Amsterdam. Back in 2002 his larger-than-life Doctor Dulcamara hijacked the
stage of what was then De Nederlandse Opera, now Dutch National Opera. »
05 Jun 2018
“There are no gods in heaven!” sings Elektra just before her
brother Orest kills their mother. In the Greek plays about the cursed House
of Atreus the Olympian gods command the banished Orestes to return home and
avenge his father Agamemnon’s murder at the hands of his wife
Clytemnestra. He dispatches both her and her lover Aegisthus. »
05 Jun 2018
What a treat the London Music Conservatoires serve up for opera-goers each season. After the Royal Academy’s Bizet double-bill of Le docteur Miracle and La tragédie de Carmen, and in advance of the Royal College’s forthcoming pairing of Huw Watkins’ new opera, In the Locked Room, based on a short story by Thomas Hardy, and The Lighthouse by Peter Maxwell Davies, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama have delivered a culinary coupling of Paul Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner and Sir Lennox Berkeley’s The Dinner Engagement which the Conservatoire last presented for our delectation in November 2006. »
03 Jun 2018
Absence makes the heart grow fonder; or does it? In Così fan tutte, who knows? Or rather, what could such a question even mean? »
03 Jun 2018
“Wort oder Ton?” asks Richard Strauss’s final opera, Capriccio. The Countess answers with a question of her own, at the close of this self-consciously self-reflective Konversationstück für Musik: “Gibt es einen, der nicht trivail ist?” (“Is there any ending that isn’t trivial?”) »
01 Jun 2018
“These portals, these columns prove/that wisdom, industry and art reside here.” So says Tamino, as he gazes up at the three imposing doors in the centre of Netia Jones’ replica of the 18th-century Wormsley Park House - in the grounds of which Garsington Opera’s ‘floating’ Pavilion makes its home each summer. »
30 May 2018
If there were any doubts that it was soon to be curtains for Verdi’s titular, tubercular heroine then the tortured gasps of laboured, languishing breath which preceded Rodula Gaitanou’s new production of La traviata for Opera Holland Park would have swiftly served to dispel them. »
29 May 2018
‘Music for a while/Shall all your cares beguile’. Standing in shadow, encircled by the five players of the viol consort Fretwork, as the summer storm raged outside Milton Court Concert Hall countertenor Iestyn Davies offered mesmeric reassurance to the capacity audience during this intriguing meeting of the baroque and the modern. »