sun 13/10/2024

Opera reviews, news and interviews

The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera review - Jamesian ambiguities chillingly preserved

David Nice

At first, you wonder if the peculiar voice of Henry James’s maybe unreliable narrator can be preserved in this production. Surely the outcome is known if we first meet the Governess in an insane asylum bed? Yet whether she was mad or maddened during the course of terrifying events 30 years earlier remains crucially unclear. Between them director/designer Isabella Bywater, soprano Ailish Tynan and conductor Duncan Ward deliver all the frissons in Britten’s concentrated masterpiece.

Trouble in Tahiti/A Quiet Place, Linbury Theatre review - top cast plays unhappy families

David Nice

Most of us have been there: an impasse in a marriage, a bereavement in a dysfunctional family. Leonard Bernstein certainly had when he composed Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, basing the unhappy couple on his own parents and even the incipient problems in his own relationship with Felicia Montealegre (see the superb film Maestro), and 30 years later the sequel, A Quiet Place, when Felicia’s early death from cancer had left him unhappy and guilty.

 

Blond Eckbert, English Touring Opera review -...

Bernard Hughes

Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert, presented by English Touring Opera at the Hackney Empire, at the beginning of its tour (paired with The Snowmaiden,...

The Marrriage of Figaro, Opera Project, Tobacco...

Mark Kidel

The Marriage of Figaro is undoubtedly one of the greatest operas ever written. Mozart’s masterpiece is a display of musical perfection that never...

Béatrice et Bénédict, Irish National Opera,...

David Nice

As Fiona Shaw’s shiningly free and easy narration told us, Shakespeare’s sparring Beatrice and Benedick are merely counterpoint to a supposedly comic...

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Il trittico, Welsh National Opera review - welcome back (but not a good sign)

Stephen Walsh

Cast changes but no drop in quality

The Snowmaiden, English Touring Opera review - a rich harvest with modest means

Boyd Tonkin

Human warmth, and musical wealth, in Rimsky-Korsakov's fairy-tale

Suor Angelica, English National Opera review - isolated one-acter lacks emotional inscaping

David Nice

Annilese Miskimmon’s mix of nuns and girls in trouble isn’t new, and not intense enough

The Magic Flute, Opera North review - a fresh vision of Mozart’s masterpiece

Robert Beale

Projected imagery and light sabers in story seen through a child’s eyes

Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera review - the heart left cold

David Nice

Promising youth trapped between exaggerated conducting and cool production

First Person: soprano Elizabeth Atherton on the decimation of the classical music sector in Wales

Elizabeth Atherton

Singer who began her career on contract with Welsh National Opera clarifies savage cuts by Welsh and English Arts Councils

Rigoletto, Welsh National Opera review - back to what they do best

Stephen Walsh

Debauchery vulgarised but the music stays pure

Prom 68, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Garsington Opera review - eerie beauty sometimes faintly glittering

David Nice

Strong cast and top orchestra project as best they can in a fine company's first Proms visit

La traviata, Royal Opera review - a charismatic soprano in a serviceable revival

Alexandra Coghlan

Richard Eyre's classic production looks great but lacks fizz

Prom 52, Carmen, Glyndebourne Festival review - fine-tuning a masterpiece

David Nice

No loss of vivid focus as the Albert Hall becomes Bar Lillas Pastia

Verdi's Requiem / Capriccio, Edinburgh International Festival 2024 review - words, music, judgement

Simon Thompson

Philharmonia Orchestra closes the festival with grandeur and intimacy

The Fabulist, Charing Cross Theatre review - fine singing cannot rescue an incoherent production

Gary Naylor

Beautiful music, but curious decisions in scripting and staging sink the show

Le nozze di Figaro, Komische Oper Berlin, Edinburgh International Festival 2024 review - great singing wasted

Simon Thompson

Entertaining in places, this is Kirill Serebrennikov’s piece, not Mozart’s

Oedipus Rex, Scottish Opera, Edinburgh International Festival 2024 review - beautifully uncomplex

Miranda Heggie

Organic immersion for this memorable night at the museum

Prom 24, The Fairy Queen, Les Arts Florissants/Le Jardin des Voix, Agnew review - hip-hop hornpipes

Boyd Tonkin

A spectacularly skilful show lacks the human touch

Tristan und Isolde, Glyndebourne review - infinite love at white heat

David Nice

The London Philharmonic Orchestra burns for the country house opera’s music director

The Butterfly House, Clonter Opera review - Puccini in biographical briefs

Robert Beale

The life and many loves of the composer told with his own music

ll Segreto di Susanna/Pagliacci, Opera Holland Park review - on with the motley, out with the fags

Boyd Tonkin

An intriguing comic partner for the great backstage melodrama

First Person: trans opera singer Lucia Lucas on Tippett’s 'New Year' and her life in music

Lucia Lucas

The baritone’s success with Birmingham Opera Company has led to further reflections

theartsdesk at the Buxton International Festival - power and glory in early Verdi

Robert Beale

An enjoyable surprise in ingenious Handel oratorio staging

First Person: Katharina Kastening on directing slimline Bizet in a year rich in 'Carmen' productions

Katharina Kastening

Peter Brook's 'La Tragédie de Carmen' further reimagined at Buxton

Orlando, Academy of Ancient Music, Cummings, Barbican review - madly beautiful

Boyd Tonkin

Concert format finds the humanity in Handel's magic pantomime

Le nozze di Figaro, Garsington Opera review - fine-tuned telling it as it is

David Nice

Youthful leads add to the pleasures of Mozart's greatest comedy in perfect surroundings

Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne review - every number a winner from dazzling revival cast

David Nice

David McVicar’s celebrated Handel returns in the highest style

Footnote: a brief history of opera in Britain

Britain has world-class opera companies in the Royal Opera, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera and Opera North, not to mention the celebrated country-house festival at Glyndebourne and others elsewhere. The first English opera was an experiment in 1656, as Civil War raged between Cromwell and Charles II, and it was under the restored king that theatre and opera exploded in London. Henry Purcell composed the masterpiece Dido and Aeneas (for a girls' school) and over the next century Handel, Gluck, J C Bach and Haydn came to London to compose Italian-style classical operas.

Hogarth_Beggars_Opera_1731_cTateHowever, the imported style was challenged by the startling success of John Gay's low-life street opera The Beggar's Opera (1728), a score collating 69 folk ballads, which set off a wave of indigenous popular musical theatre (pictured, William Hogarth's The Beggar's Opera, 1731, © Tate). Gay built the first Covent Garden opera house (1732), where three of Handel's operas were premiered, and musical theatre and vaudeville flourished as an alternative to opera. Through the 19th century, London became a hub for visiting composers and grand opera stars, but from the meshing of "high" and "popular" creativity at Sadler's Wells (built in 1765) evolved in time a distinct English tradition of wit and social satire in the "Savoy" operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

In the 20th century Benjamin Britten's dramatic operas such as Peter Grimes and Billy Budd reflected a different sort of ordinariness, his genius driving the formation of the English Opera Group at Aldeburgh. English opera, and opera in English, became central to the establishment, after the Second World War, of a national arts infrastructure, with subsidised resident companies at English National Opera and the Royal Opera. By the 1950s, due to pressure from international opera stars refusing to learn roles in English, Covent Garden joined the circuit of major international houses, staging opera in their original languages, with visiting stars such as Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi and the young Luciano Pavarotti matched by home-grown ones like Joan Sutherland and Geraint Evans.

Today British opera thrives with a reputation for fresh thinking in classics, from new productions of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner landmarks to new opera commissions and popular arena stagings of Carmen. The Arts Desk brings you the fastest overnight reviews and the quickest ticket booking links for last night's openings, as well as the most thoughtful close-up interviews with major creative figures and performers. Our critics include Igor Toronyi-Lalic, David Nice, Edward Seckerson, Alexandra Coghlan, Graham Rickson and Ismene Brown.

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