Opera
edward.seckerson
Can we clear something up once and for all, please? Yet again this week an all too familiar headline caught my eye: “Is Juan Diego Florez the heir apparent to Pavarotti?” Or words to that effect. Why do these lazy (and/or ill-informed) editors and their headline writers keep asking the same rhetorical question? Surely they should know by now that the answer is a great big resounding “no”. Not because Florez is inferior or less famous or lacks the potential for superstardom (the marketing men have already gone into overdrive about him) but quite simply because he is a completely, utterly, Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Let's get straight to the fellatio, shall we. The blow job - and its Polaroid rendition - that led to the 1960s divorce trial of the dissolute Duchess of Argyll forms the centrepiece aria (an aria that "begins with words and ends with humming") in Thomas Adès's opera Powder Her Face. And how good we were: as silent as a row of Trappists. There was none of the outrage, laughter, consternation that this staged blowy could once summon up and that once led Classic FM to ban the work. Sex, when dealt with correctly - as in Carlos Wagner's revival production - is never really scandalous. It's Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
David McVicar's new Aida production had an opening mise en scène of such unashamed ugliness, a revolving main feature (a wall of scaffolding) of such audacious featurelessness, a wardrobe of such brazen tastelessness (think Dungeons and Dragons), that my critical faculties sort of went into a coma. I looked on, my mouth so wide open I was virtually dribbling, wondering what had happened to the great McVicar, praying for the return of a refreshed and fragrant reality, imagining that something - a fire, a flood - might intervene on my behalf between now and the end of the opera to Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
We all know what you get when you find yourself snowed in with your family up a mountain: thunderous carpets, corridors of blood, redrum and a head in the snow. Hans Werner Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers isn't quite as murderously single-minded as Kubrick's The Shining, but it is dominated by a single terrorising nut job.A gemütlich Austrian inn is the setting. The opening scene sees an incontinent flurry of activity as kith and kin await the descent for breakfast of the great poet Gregor Mittenhofer (Stephen Page). Mittenhofer is your strip-cartoon Romantic: an ungovernable poet-vulture, Read more ...
David Nice
Venezuela's joyful musical education programme known as El Sistema is the phenomenon of the age, the success story that many western countries now seek to replicate. And that's great. But Britain, for a start, might re-engage its own back-to-basics in music quicker by looking closer to home and seeing how Finland does it. In a small population, every child has free access to an instrument until secondary school. So there's clearly a link between the plethora of outstanding classically trained musicians constantly emerging from Finland and a primary-school opera based on the life of Vincent Read more ...
theartsdesk
English National Opera’s 2010-11 season includes 10 new productions, including ENO premieres of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Handel’s Radamisto. There will be two new contemporary operas for the main stage: the world premiere of a new opera by Nico Muhly and the UK premiere of A Dog’s Heart by Alexander Raskatov. ENO directing debuts will be made by Benedict Andrews (The Return of Ulysses), Mike Figgis (Lucrezia Borgia), Terry Gilliam (The Damnation of Faust), Des McAnuff (Faust), Simon McBurney (A Dog’s Heart), Rufus Norris (Don Giovanni), Bartlett Sher (new Nico Muhly opera) and Dmitri Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Fiona Shaw talks about the not inconsiderable demands of juggling Restoration comedy with German Expressionism. It almost doesn’t bear thinking about. Between shows at the National Theatre, where she’s been delighting audiences with her rollocking Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance, she enthuses about her second foray into the challenging business of directing opera: Hans Werner Henze’s early gem Elegy for Young Lovers for English National Opera at the Young Vic. She enlightens us about this strange, dream-like opera-play, about the not-so-delicate balance of being a working actor and Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Yesterday afternoon, Semyon Bychkov's recording of Lohengrin won BBC Music Magazine's prestigious disc of the year. Last year, The Sunday Telegraph named his recording of Eugene Onegin one of the top 10 opera recordings of all time. Proof - if proof were needed - that the Russian conductor is one of the living greats of the operatic pit. His upcoming Tannhäuser next season at Covent Garden is awaited with bated breath. His concert performances with the WDR Symphony Orchestra, Cologne, which he has headed up as chief conductor for the past 12 years, have not gone unnoticed either. None of it Read more ...
edward.seckerson
The auditorium has risen once more, the box office is open and busy, and the peacocks are out – Opera Holland Park in London is gearing up for the new season. In this “live and uncut” podcast Edward Seckerson talks to James Clutton (above, left) and Michael Volpe about opera rarities, exciting young talent, exciting older talent, the prospect of Wagner (could there be a Dutchman in the offing?), the X Factor, and much, much more. In keeping with the name of Opera Holland Park's community project INSPIRE, the mix of operas reaching into 2012 and beyond is as eclectic as ever with old Read more ...
David Nice
Why write gluey pastiche Massenet and Puccini when you could compose as your flamboyant self? Why collaborate on a cliché-ridden French text when your song lyrics declare themselves so piquantly in English? Rufus Wainwright must have his own reasons for concocting a fantasy of what opera might, or used to, be. Frankly I'd prefer an honest, Mamma Mia!-style confection of the masterly, and undeniably operatic, pop hits from his two Want albums. Yet the funny thing is that at the end of a weird but stylishly presented evening of Prima Donna, though resisting the obligatory standing ovation, I Read more ...
David Nice
Those of us who shied away from the Manchester world premiere of Rufus Wainwright's first opera, Prima Donna, last year are biting our nails about the first London performance at Sadler's Wells Theatre on Monday. Fond as we are of some masterly songs on his albums, we wonder if he's boxing above his weight in indulging his love of opera... and in French, too (OK, he grew up speaking it, but even so, it's pretentious French for English-speaking audiences). This evening, Radio 3's In Tune featured an interview with our Rufus and a preview performance by top-notch soprano Janis Kelly of her Read more ...