Can the 1916 Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal added to a revised version of a 1912 opera-within-a-play setting the backstage shenanigans to music ever fail? Yes, alas. It fell horribly flat last night despite some radiant singing. The love story of deserted Ariadne finally being persuaded by young Bacchus in the opera proper is harder to make live and breathe, but it has in the past - notably and most movingly at Garsington in 2023 - and again it didn't achieve anything like its full humanity here, despite so many glorious sounds from stage and pit, fully backed by the supportive Read more ...

You don't have to be mad to enjoy Gerald Barry's methodically berserk approach to Wilde, but your wits might have begun to turn by the interval and you'll question your sanity by the end. Director Jack Furness has extra ideas the composer would surely like - Australia? Kangaroo! - and marshals the carefully choreographed antics of a musically and dramatically spot-on cast, while Douglas Boyd, game to be ritually humiliated, gets select Philharmonia players to pack a punch and even offer an occasional if brief dose of tenderness from the side of a dazzlingly composed stage.This is the equal Read more ...

Buxton’s summer jamboree for opera lovers this year offers a brace of baroque works, written 90 years apart, with the character of sorceress as their common feature.Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula was one of the string of Italian operas created by him for London shortly after his arrival in Britain. First seen in 1715, it has four soloists only and the conventional unities of time and place – though early performances were apparently given with spectacular stage effects.The sorceress, Melissa, rules a magic island where two young men and one young woman are her captives. She loves Amadigi, he loves Read more ...

Buxton International Festival, long known for its explorations of some of the less well-known parts of the opera repertoire, this year features two of the best-loved, alongside its other fare.Its first two nights saw a new production of La Traviata (jointly with Norwich Theatre, to which it will go after the Derbyshire spa town’s summer festival is over), and a borrowed one from Scottish Opera and Opera Holland Park of The Merry Widow (seen last year both north of the border and in London).The Verdi is a staging of which no good producing house would need to feel ashamed. BIF has sometimes Read more ...

It was an awesome start, those three notes from the cellos even before Wagner's famous "Tristan" chord inspiring more deep emotion than the whole of the previous evening's Bellini I puritani. Somehow, though the end left me dry-eyed, and so did the rest of an undeniably impressive evening. Antonio Pappano gets magnificent sounds from his London Symphony Orchestra, but here felt like his predecessor Simon Rattle in hitting too hard at times, albeit with more flexibility. And with the Metropolitan Opera screening all too fresh in the memory, this Tristan and Isolde already had an impossible Read more ...

When it was last staged at the Royal Opera 34 years ago, 33-year-old Bellini's swansong felt like a baggy monster barely justified by some brilliant singing (chiefly from June Anderson and Dmitri Hvorostovsky). Lisette Oropesa now adds remarkable acting to the star vehicle, but even Richard Jones can't do that much with an unwieldy drama, despite his usual signature elements and symmetries. The verdict remains that theatrically one-dimensional bel canto museum pieces like this are best done in concert.Bellini did pull the drama off, with a concise series of dramatic confrontations, in his Read more ...

Fifty years since Benjamin Britten died, and his operas are still in repertory: half a dozen of them at least. It’s a tribute to his theatrical, as much as to his musical, genius that these works still punch their weight on the stage as much as on disc; and perhaps none of them punches it harder than Billy Budd, which Glyndebourne are reviving in Michael Grandage’s spectacular production from 2010.In Billy Budd, as in Peter Grimes, Britten’s tragic agent is the sea. But whereas in Grimes the sea is purely the mechanism behind events on land, in Budd it is all around, an image of life and our Read more ...

The conundrum of five women, three of them men, is the same as it was in the last Serse I witnessed, in the more intimate surroundings of St Martin-in-the-Fields. Paula Murrihy then sang the role of Arsamene, playing brother to Emily D'Angelo's Xerxes and lover to Lucy Crowe's Romilda. Now she's the imperious, capricious ruler to the life, totally different from D'Angelo's but just as valid. The only comparative shortcoming was that compared to Harry Bicket getting bite from The English Concert, Laurence Cummings had the Academy of Ancient Music play sprightly principal boy rather than fiery Read more ...

William Kentridge’s production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo marks a double début at Glyndebourne – neither the director nor the opera, considered by many to be the first proper example of the genre, have appeared here before. Kentridge – who made his name as an artist chronicling oppressive power structures in South Africa – now takes on the ultimate oppressive power of Death, turning the story of Orpheus into an account shimmering with anguished hopes and thwarted possibilities. Kentridge’s distinctive style of animation – a continuous process of drawing pictures in charcoal, then rubbing Read more ...

Reader, I confess that I entered the dark space of Pélleas et Mélisande at Snape Maltings with a prior conviction: that, although musicians adore (for the best of reasons) Debussy’s sole completed opera, audiences sometimes simply endure it. However, strongly singers and orchestra (here, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with Ryan Wigglesworth) convey this dense-woven tapestry of suffering, foreboding and confinement, the first half especially can make listeners echo Pélleas’s cry down in the airless vaults where Golaud drags him: “I’m suffocating.” Wigglesworth, his wholly committed Read more ...

“Never have I had such a day,” sings the baffled Emperor Tito as he wearily forgives all and sundry for their conspiracies, treacheries, deceits, attempted murders – and, by the way, for trashing the Capitol long before Trumpian thugs had the same idea. At which point the Grange Festival audience, forgivably, laughs. Mozart’s farewell opera seria from 1791, La Clemenza di Tito presents such a high-minded tableau of imperial nobility and forbearance that we can lose sight of its closeness at some points to utter, Marriage of Figaro-level, farce. Tito’s breakneck shifts Read more ...

The first question is always: Don Carlos or Don Carki? Verdi’s opera was originally composed for Paris in 1867, in French, with the requisite five acts and the inevitable ballet. For Milan in 1884 he reduced this to four acts, dropping the whole of the first act and the ballet, and making substantial revisions to what remained, as well as of course translating the libretto into Italian. There were many tinkerings in between.Jo Davies’s production, made for the Hampshire Grange Park Opera a decade ago and now revived for the second time at the Surrey Grange Park, opts (somewhat unfashionably) Read more ...