Opera Reviews

La Calisto, Hampstead Garden Opera

alexandra Coghlan Monday, 28 April 2014

Baroque operas are like buses. You wait years for some Cavalli to come along, and then three of his operas arrive almost at once. It all started with English Touring Opera’s Jason last October – a witty and endlessly shape-shifting work – followed by the Royal Opera’s glossy L’Ormindo at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse last month. Now, undeterred by larger rivals, Hampstead Garden Opera continue the trend with La Calisto.

Khovanshchina, Birmingham Opera Company

stephen Walsh Wednesday, 23 April 2014

Has anyone ever sat through Musorgsky’s last, not quite finished, opera about the struggle for power in Moscow at the time of Peter the Great’s accession in the 1690s, and come away with the slightest idea of what it’s all about? If Khovanshchina had depended for its impact on any kind of Verdian clarity or dramaturgical shape, it would long ago have sunk without trace.

La Traviata, Royal Opera

Sebastian Scotney Sunday, 20 April 2014

The German soprano Diana Damrau has had the role of Violetta Valéry in La Traviata in her sights for a very long time. As she has explained in interviews, seeing the Zeffirelli film of the opera, with Teresa Stratas in the title role, as a 12-year old was a decisive moment in making her want to become a singer. That was 30 years ago.

Powder Her Face, English National Opera, Ambika P3

alexandra Coghlan Thursday, 03 April 2014

The opening gyrations of Thomas Adès’s bluesy, schmoozy overture to Powder Her Face beckon you into a world of cheap sensation and excess. Accordion, saxophones and sizzle cymbal add their indecent, after-hours suggestions, and you have a microcosm in moments. Almost 20 years on from its premiere, Adès’s opera about the scandalous “Dirty Duchess” still has all the moves.

Prince Igor, Novaya Opera, London Coliseum

David Nice Wednesday, 02 April 2014

Had this Moscow production any serious ideas in its head until its suddenly effective epilogue, much might have been pertinently said about an opera in which an imperialistic campaign ends in disaster, and where the Polovtsian “enemy” shows far more signs of a civilized life and wartime courtesy than the corrupt, crumbling court at home.

Comment

L’Ormindo, Royal Opera, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Kimon Daltas Wednesday, 26 March 2014

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the new indoor Jacobean theatre at The Globe, is an absolute jewel of painstaking historical research and craftsmanship. It is small, seating around 350, and with its thrust stage lit by around 100 candles (with electric light only on the musicians’ gallery in this performance), it is a challenging space to put on an opera, but also a uniquely atmospheric one.

Die Frau ohne Schatten, Royal Opera

David Nice Saturday, 15 March 2014

The big message of The Woman Without a Shadow, brushing aside the narrower, moral majority preaching that you’re incomplete without children, seems clear: fulfillment can’t be bought at the cost of another’s suffering. Yet the path towards that realization in this "massive and artificial fairy-tale", as an increasingly alienated Richard Strauss called it, is strewn with magnificent thorns in both his complex, layered music and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s elaborate symbolic libretto.

Le docteur Miracle, Pop-up Opera, The Running Horse

David Nice Tuesday, 11 March 2014

An orchestral musician recently told me that only one per cent of graduates from UK music colleges go on to take up a post in an established opera company or orchestra. You’d think, given such an alarming statistic, that there would be a lot of very good voices floating around trying to drum up work. Young talent is enterprisingly putting itself out there in a new wave of pub or site-specific fringe performances.

Comment

La Fille du régiment, Royal Opera

David Nice Tuesday, 04 March 2014

Roll up, roll up, to hear Juan Diego Flórez deliver his nine cheek-by-jowl top Cs in the umpteenth performance of Laurent Pelly’s slick, often funny Donizetti comedy. Does the whole thing still fizz? Only up to a point in Christian Räth's revival. Yet I’d still rather see this – or Don Pasquale, or L’elisir d’amore – any number of times than endure any more of the composer’s “unjustly neglected” tinpot tragedies.

Rodelinda, English National Opera

David Nice Saturday, 01 March 2014

If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves.