“Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light – were all like workings of one mind.” Writing almost a century after Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Wordsworth was still contemplating the essential duality of the sublime – that greatest of Enlightenment legacies. Rationalism, order and science, we are reminded, are only the admissible part of an age that would also beget the sinister fantasies of Romanticism and the Gothic – those most pernicious of bastard offspring.
opera reviews
igor.toronyilalic
When future historians write the story of 21st-century film, Mike Figgis will play a founding father-like role. Figgis's Timecode (2000) was one of the world's first and most ambitious digital films. I still remember the excitement the day I saw it, the unified screen before me shattering into shards of narrative. This was the first film to sing in four simultaneously cast parts in the manner of a Bach fugue. Notwithstanding its many faults, it felt like the silver screen's Ring cycle.
igor.toronyilalic
For us Ramistes the brilliance came as no surprise. But did the genius come across to the uninitiated? This new production of Castor et Pollux, one of Rameau's finest tragédie en musique, was the Baroque composer's Austrian stage premiere. Would the Theater an der Wien's audience look past the oddities and archaisms and unfamiliarities of Rameau's 300-year-old musical and dramatic language and embrace the radical nature of his leggy recitatives and proto-Romantic ebb and flow? No question.
alexandra.coghlan
Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier’s Il Barbiere di Siviglia comes gift-wrapped in its own candy-striped box – packaging that sets the tone for the brittle, sugary entertainment within. Trading satire for slapstick, politics for aesthetics, and subversion for celebration, the production is generous in laughs but lingers scarcely longer in the mind than on the lips. With previous alumni including Mark Elder, Joyce DiDonato and Juan Diego Flórez, there are some long shadows looming over the show’s hot-pink horizon, adding a not unwelcome sense of edginess to this latest revival – an edginess entirely absent from the production itself.
graham.rickson
“If you’re not careful, the opening act could become a costume parade: there are the townspeople, the children, the guards, the factory women – up to 350 people on stage in 20 minutes, before Carmen even enters, singing a catchy jingle from a recent TV advert.” So wrote director Daniel Kramer in last week’s Guardian. This may fill Carmen fans with nervous apprehension, but none should be felt, as this production is one of the most visually spectacular and exciting things I’ve seen.
Ismene Brown
Fairy tales are fear tales really, the sweetening (and sharpening) of every child’s worst nightmares, emotions long buried in adulthood but very easily tapped back into with good theatre productions. The Witch in Hansel and Gretel should be the queen of the team of the ogres who lurk in forests or homes waiting to kill children, along with lieutenants the Wolf in Red Riding Hood, Snow White’s wicked stepmother and Carabosse in The Sleeping Beauty.
David Nice
In the Sun King's domain, dazzling noon succcumbed to a monstrous snowstorm at twilight. Within the chandeliered splendour of his successor Louis XV's Opéra Royal, a similar drama was about to be enacted: heroic Bellerophon, caught in time-honoured operatic fashion in a struggle between two love rivals, would have to face the chimera on the road to glory. Since this was the by-and-large cosy Lully rather than radical Rameau, I wasn't expecting to feel any pity and terror. Yet pity and sympathy there certainly were thanks to Lully's finest inventions in the hands of Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques and a superlative Belgian chamber choir.
In the Sun King's domain, dazzling noon succcumbed to a monstrous snowstorm at twilight. Within the chandeliered splendour of his successor Louis XV's Opéra Royal, a similar drama was about to be enacted: heroic Bellerophon, caught in time-honoured operatic fashion in a struggle between two love rivals, would have to face the chimera on the road to glory. Since this was the by-and-large cosy Lully rather than radical Rameau, I wasn't expecting to feel any pity and terror. Yet pity and sympathy there certainly were thanks to Lully's finest inventions in the hands of Christophe Rousset's Les Talens Lyriques and a superlative Belgian chamber choir.
igor.toronyilalic
The double standards in opera are amazing. If heldentenor Johan Botha - a man the size of a small Eastern European country - had been a woman, he would have been refused re-entry to the stage till he'd had a gastric band fitted. But his size was the least of our worries. For those of us who vainly cling to the idea of opera as a viable dramatic art form, Botha's return to Covent Garden as Tannhäuser was one of the most profoundly depressing experiences of my life.
igor.toronyilalic
Classical music does not get any cooler or sexier than mezzo Vesselina Kasarova. An awesome black jumpsuit hanging off her rangy figure, she possessed the Barbican stage last night. She jived. She grooved. She shuffled. She shimmied. Every bit of her body was in ecstasy, her neck sliding about like an Indian dancer's, her feet (in perfect little heels) spinning like a jazzer's, her bullying arms posturing and prodding, her face distorting in the maddest ways imaginable (words can't come close to describing what was going on here), her mouth flashing its whites like a primate's. Her voice? Extraordinarily weird, moving, honest, explosive. Her Sta nell'Ircana was a theatrical moment of the year.
David Nice
Events surrounding the birth of the unrepentantly "un-American" Marc Blitzstein's early (1936-7) shot at socially aware music-theatre prove much more interesting than the show itself. Heck, I got more out of reading the programme than I did sitting through the whole darned thing. Let's face it, Blitzstein's mostly foursquare marriage of words and music sucks. Not that the dynamic Mehmet Ergen's latest Arcola team didn't give it their best shot.