Opera
igor.toronyilalic
It may look like a sure-fire hit to let Kansas mezzo Joyce DiDonato rip through the drama-queen repertoire of the Baroque. But last night’s exploration of the dustiest, most overgrown byways of 17th and 18th century Italian opera needed every drop of DiDonato’s star musical talents – not to mention those of her backing band Il Complesso Barocco – to convince us of the worth of these rarities. The audience bought it. I remain on the fence.Prepared in conjunction with that great scholar of this period, Alan Curtis, the concert didn’t disappoint in certain key respects. In mood, narrative flow Read more ...
David Nice
Studying Russian for three years to read Pushkin’s verse-novel Eugene Onegin in the original doesn’t guarantee the finest interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s equally great lyric homage. Yet it certainly seems to have focused the imagination of Covent Garden’s new Director of Opera, Kasper Holten, and allows him to inflect every move his characters make with the right emotion.His basic premise begins at the end: with the older, more dislocated Onegin and Tatyana aching their way back to that time in a mid-19th century adolescence when happiness was so close. That makes it clear at the start that Read more ...
David Nice
How’s a good time girl to bare her beautiful soul when a director seems bent on cutting her down to puppet size? It doesn't bother me that Peter Konwitschny shears Verdi’s already concise score by about 20 minutes to shoehorn it into a one-act drama; what goes is either inessential or among the usual casualties of standard Traviatas. The spare and economical idea of layered curtains to symbolise the characters' constriction or emancipation is good in principle, too. But so impassioned is American soprano Corinne Winters’s Violetta that to rob her of any meaningful relationships with the man Read more ...
Ismene Brown
It's an offer from paradise for the keen arts-lover - free tickets to up to 30 must-see stage shows over the next year. The Olivier Awards traditionally include "public" members on their expert panels of professionals who assess the stage arts each year, and the Dance and Opera panels are looking for their public judges for the 2014 awards, which will judge shows starting from this March.The deadline for applications is 5 February. Applicants need to live near London and be over 18, and need to prioritise seeing all the eligible shows in their category over the next 12 months. As the job is Read more ...
David Nice
This may have been the official, lavish fanfare for the Southbank’s The Rest is Noise Festival, which if the hard sell hasn’t hit you yet is a year-long celebration of 20th Century music in its cultural context and based around Alex Ross's bestseller of the same name. For Jurowski and the LPO, though, it was very much through-composed programme planning as usual, though with a sweeping bow towards the festival theme of how modernism evolved as it did.In this case Jurowski fashioned a very selective, very long (it could have been a three-parter) and often unusual nine-year odyssey for Richard Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Flesh-tearing, woman-raping, body-goring brute he may be, but he's misunderstood, that Minotaur. It's a bold argument to make, but this is the contention of Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent's 2008 opera. They are aided by a surprisingly cuddly performance from John Tomlinson. Head trapped in a prosthetic bull's cranium, hairy belly flopping out, a small stick-on penis standing to attention, Tomlinson is a reluctant and eloquent (if still pretty hideous) half-man, half-beast, soliloquising soulfully on his existential crisis (that of being treated as all-beast when he sees himself as Read more ...
graham.rickson
The overpowering nastiness of Shakespeare’s source material is offset by Verdi’s sublime, impeccably judged music; this is a wonderful opera with barely a dud moment. Trust the score, get decent singers and an understanding, intelligent conductor, and everything should be fine.The one rocky moment in Opera North’s new production of Otello comes in the opening minutes; Verdi’s storm-tossed prelude blasts out gloriously, the huge ensemble cast enter and stare boldly out into the auditorium. And yet, when the solo singing starts it’s almost impossible to ascertain where the individual voices are Read more ...
David Nice
Rolando Villazón at 40 is back on reasonably stylish form, as far as the voice will allow him to go – which is not always up and volume-wise only just as far as the Covent Garden Balcony. John Copley’s Royal Opera Bohème is two years younger than the Mexican tenor. It burns less warmly than the faltering stove in the first act, casts a pall over collective attempts to reanimate the naturalism which is all there in Puccini’s perfect score, and needs a second interval to drag its weary bones back up the stairs to the students’ attic in Act Four.The late Julia Trevelyan Oman’s sets still have Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Few singers provoke more debate than Rolando Villazón. His off-piste projects - from his Romantic exploration of the Baroque to his spell as a talent contest judge - have been much discussed over the years. By comparison, there's something strangely calm and conventional about Villazón's two latest projects: a new album of Verdi on Deutsche Grammophon and a performance of John Copley's La Bohème at the Royal Opera House. Yet you'd be foolish to ignore either. The celebrated Mexican tenor is the kind of singer who could make the Yellow Pages seem fresh. Theartsdesk caught Read more ...
David Nice
Much more regularly than the seven years it takes the Flying Dutchman's demon ship to reach dry land, the Zurich Opera steamer moors at the Southbank Centre. None of its more recent concert performances up to now has branded itself on the memory as much as its 2003 visit, when chorus and soloists stunned in Wagner's Tannhäuser. This one will, though: and the wonder of it is that Bryn Terfel's surely unsurpassable Dutchman, condemned to the seas for all eternity unless saved by the faithful-until-death love of a good woman, had other singers to match him.In the first act, the great Wagnerian Read more ...
David Nice
One of Russia’s greatest and most inspirational sopranos, Galina Vishnevskaya died on 11 December at the age of 86. To the world at large, she will probably be most famous for taking an heroic stand alongside her husband, cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, against the Soviet authorities over the treatment of Alexander Solzhenitsyn; in 1974, the couple were stripped of their citizenship as a result.Inside the Soviet Union up to that point she had long been the Bolshoi Opera’s prima donna assoluta, and though she went on to record some roles past her prime, there are peerless Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
My phone's predictive text posed an interesting question. Robert le Doable it insisted on calling last night's opera. And it's often been asked of this and other grands opéras. Are they doable? Such was the munificence of the times in which they thrived, and such has been the collapse in their popularity, are grands opéras worthy of resurrection? And do we have the resources and good will to do justice to their singular vision? If any opera company could meet the all-singing, all-dancing demands, it is the Royal Opera House. And if any of the hundreds of grands opéras that graced Read more ...