Opera
David Nice
The trouble with Trovatore, Verdi’s sometimes barrel-organish, slightly middle-aged troubadour, isn’t so much the silly shocker of a plot, triggered by a gypsy so crazed with vengeance that she throws her own baby on a bonfire by mistake, as the choppy dramatic line, so hard to thread. Under the circumstance, Adele Thomas’s medieval-hell production could have been a lot worse, and the vocal quality is there throughout under Antonio Pappano’s watchful guidance.Two of the cast are officially new to the run, though soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen had already replaced Marina Rebeka in some Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Benoit Jacquot’s handsome period production of Werther has been quietly putting in the miles for the Royal Opera. Since its premiere in 2004, this unexceptionable staging – “this wall, this fountain, this cool shade” all present and laboriously correct – has supplied a London star vehicle for everyone from Joyce DiDonato and Isabel Leonard to Juan Diego Florez, Rollando Villazon and Vittorio Grigolo. Now it’s the turn of Jonas Kaufmann – or, at least, it was supposed to be.No announcement was made, but it was evident from his opening “Je ne sais si je veille” – almost lost under Antonio Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Frederick Delius composed an opera called A Village Romeo and Juliet; Donizetti composed a sort of village Tristan and Isolde, but called it L’elisir d’amore – The Love Potion. The hero, Nemorino, inspired by the Tristan tale, buys an elixir off a passing quack, in the hope it will make the beautiful, capricious Adina fall for him.But, arguably like Wagner’s, the potion is fake (red wine, in this case, probably throat lotion in Wagner’s), and Nemorino gets his girl because he unknowingly inherits a fortune, the village girls fawn over him, and Adina becomes jealous.How much of this agreeable Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like any decent cake (and we saw plenty on the Holland Park stage), a tasty production of Hansel and Gretel needs a careful balance of flavours. Sweet and sharp; light and dark; fantasy and realism; fright and delight. Directed by John Wilkie, Opera Holland Park’s version of Engelbert Humperdinck’s well-preserved “fairy-tale opera” from 1893 skilfully mixes its ingredients into a sort of Great Grimm Bake-Off. It hints at horrors but never really threatens to turn sour. Opera-goers may well sample more challenging, or sinister, readings of Humperdinck’s fruity mix of folkloric pantomime and Read more ...
David Nice
Harrowing and holiness alternate in Poulenc’s unique masterpiece, nominally an opera about nuns during the French revolution, at a deeper level a music-drama about the greatest disturbances in the human condition. Glyndebourne’s cast, conductor and orchestra handle the variety wth total mastery. If Barrie Kosky’s production lets horror overwhelm us, that’s justified too. If you’re not a heap at the end of it, that’s your problem.Kosky’s classic Handel Saul at Glyndebourne descended from flowery opulence to dust and ashes. His Dialogues starts with explosive dread against Katrin Lea Tag’s Read more ...
David Nice
Sullivan’s score for his eighth collaboration with Gilbert is vintage work, mostly equal to the splendid sentinels flanking it, Iolanthe and The Mikado. On Wednesday night master animator John Wilson did its buoyancy and occasional pathos full justice. But what of Gilbert’s words? “A woman’s [sic] college! Maddest folly going!” doesn’t promise an operetta for our times.In fact it’s more complicated than that. In the battle of the sexes, men are lunks, bullies or silly young things; the women come off rather better, but their determination to “abjure tyrannic man” walled up in Princess Ida’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“I am a poor student,” the Duke tells a smitten Gilda, in music that can barely keep a straight face, so plush is its melody, so oozing with confidence and privilege.It’s a short step from there to Cecilia Stinton’s new Rigoletto for Opera Holland Park, which takes him – almost – at his word, transplanting Verdi’s rapey young aristo from 16th-century Mantua to an Oxford college between the wars: a Bullingdon Club hooray to Rigoletto’s downtrodden college porter with a chest full of medals and a gammy leg.It's a playful idea, Rigoletto as origin-myth for, ahem, a certain type of public Read more ...
Robert Beale
Innovation is always a risky business. Opera North’s vision and ambition for this production is to create, in effect, a new genre: a combination of staged choral-orchestral performance with contemporary dance.Partnership and diversity are the buzz words – good ones, too – and the concept brings together the opera company’s soloists, chorus and orchestra with dancers from both Leeds-based Phoenix Dance Theatre and South Africa’s Jazzart Dance Theatre, plus some help from Capetown Opera.The link here is choreographer Dane Hurst, until recently artistic director of Phoenix and now its artistic Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Götterdämmerung is not only the grandest of Wagner’s Ring operas, it is also the most varied. Siegfried’s journey down the Rhine transports him in a short quarter-hour from the hieratic world of the Norns and the World Ash to the soap-opera of the Gibichungs and their anxieties about marriage and political standing (opinion polls?).The second act culminates in a revenge trio worthy of Meyerbeer. Siegfried’s squalid onstage murder – shades of Bizet’s exactly contemporary Carmen – is followed by a thirty-minute disquisition on the end of the world.I exaggerate, but only a little. Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Sometimes a production which isn’t trying to do anything too clever can be quite refreshing. Sinéad O’Neill's revival of Annabel Arden’s 2007 Glyndebourne touring production of Donizetti’s L’elisir d’amore is just that.It doesn’t attempt a retelling of the story, or provide any flashy visual trickery. Instead it’s slick, stylish and straight to the point - and tremendous fun to boot. With excellent performances from all cast members, this is classic opera buffa at its best. An uncomplicated production of this opera is apt for the story too. As we know, there is no secret love potion; no Read more ...
Russell Hepplewhite
Taking a book and lifting it from the page so that it works on the stage is daunting. When the target audience happens to be children aged between about four and eight, the challenge is magnified. As I write this, a brand new company, Ignite Music, is about to embark on a nationwide tour of an opera I wrote back in 2014 that was composed specifically for this audience - the ones with the very youngest of ears. So as I attended final rehearsals very recently I was reminded of the creative journey that was taken to bring Borka: The Adventures of A Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re going to be locked in an auditorium with a crazed soldier for over 90 minutes, you need to be overwhelmed by the human frailty and baseness in Büchner’s still-shocking stage play of the late 1830s, the spiderweb beauty of Berg’s 1925 score to match it and a vision in various stage pictures. Director Deborah Warner, conductor Antonio Pappano and set designer Hyemi Shin deliver on all fronts.Though each of Shin’s stunning images is perfectly composed, and so well lit by Adam Silverman, there’s less unity in Warner’s production than there was in, for example, Richard Jones’s Welsh Read more ...