Opera
Ismene Brown
A new production by The Royal Opera of Tchaikovsky's The Tsarina's Slippers opens on Friday at Covent Garden, directed by Francesca Zambello, designed by Mikhail Mokrov and Tatiana Noginova, and with an all-Russian cast of principals conducted by Alexandr Polianichko. Read Ismene Brown's interviews with the creative team elsewhere, and enjoy this feast of design models, costume sketches and production photographs.Click on a picture to enter full view and the slideshow.Sets by Mikhail Mokrov[bg|/OPERA/ismene_brown/tsarinas_slippers/sets]Costume designs by Tatiana NoginovaCharacters: Vakula, a Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The famously tempestuous Romanian soprano is, we learn, living a separate life from her husband Roberto Alagna. If Opera's Most Romantic Couple is no more, will Brand Angela be terminally damaged? Surely a showcase performance in the South Bank's International Voices season would be just the thing to rally the faithful and reaffirm Ms Gheorghiu's spectacular star quality, but I must admit that by the time we reached the interval, I was beset with gnawing doubt.The performance had begun with a bright canter through Leonard Bernstein's Candide overture, with the Philharmonia Orchestra Read more ...
theartsdesk
English National Opera's new production of Bartók's Duke Bluebeard's Castle is photographed here by Johan Persson. Directed by Daniel Kramer, designed by Giles Cadle and lit by Peter Mumford, it updates Charles Perrault's 1697 fairytale to a horrific modern reality. Clive Bayley and Michaela Martens sing Duke Bluebeard and Judith. See Ismene Brown's review.Click on an image to open full view of the portfolio.Josef Fritzl's houseBluebeard photographs feature Clive Bayley as Bluebeard, Michaela Martens as Judith, and actorsGustave Doré's 1862 engraving for Charles Perrault's Les Contes de Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
So many 19th-century opera plots park themselves on fertile historical ground, amid all the colour, character and juice you could ever want, and then spend three hours picking at some anaemic daisies at the edges. It was a worry last night as I watched Donizetti’s Maria di Rohan in concert at the Royal Festival Hall. By sidestepping the heavyweight power players of Louis XIII’s reign, the eminently operatic figures of Cardinal Richelieu (endlessly alluded to) and Marie de Medici, weren’t we also sidestepping the juice? Thankfully, not. But we did have to wait until the second half for it to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
There are horrors in the world so vile that few of us want to think about them. None more so than such cases as Josef Fritzl - or Jaycee Lee Dugard, or Arcedio Alvarez, or Raymond Gouardo, or Wolfgang Priklopil, or Marc Dutroux... but you get the picture. Cases where men abduct girls and turn them into sex slaves and father multiple children by them, often incestuously, hiding them in garages, basements, behind walls, sometimes for decades undiscovered, sometimes murdering them. Mostly you read that it happened, you shudder, and try not to think more about it. Impossible if you go to ENO’s Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's round-up of the latest classical CDs takes in a major new Schubert recording by Mark Padmore and Paul Lewis, a pair of Shostakovich symphonies brought to fresh life in Liverpool under a young Russian conductor from the composer's home-town, a Mahler symphony recorded by the German orchestra that premiered it, a Kipling-inspired satire on artistic epigones by the half-forgotten Charles Koechlin, rare Rossini arias from Joyce DiDonato, a 60th-anniversary box-set from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and more.CD of the Month
Schubert: Winterreise, Mark Padmore/Paul Lewis ( Read more ...
edward.seckerson
With its powerfully emotive stagings of Bach's St John Passion and Verdi's Requiem English National Opera has built something of a reputation for bringing sacred masterworks to the secular stage. Award-winning director Deborah Warner, conductor and Handel specialist Lawrence Cummings, and ENO's indefatigable chorus master Martin Merry tell Edward Seckerson about the challenges of making a credible stage spectacle of Handel's Messiah, which opens on Friday 27 November. "It's about us all," says Warner, when asked how inclusive this most popular of all sacred oratorios can be. And she promises Read more ...
edward.seckerson
theartsdesk's podcasts with broadcaster Edward Seckerson continue with a look at the English National Opera's new production of two 20th-century masterpieces: Bartok's Duke Bluebeard's Castle and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Daniel Kramer takes on the mysterious Bluebeard, while Michael Keegan-Dolan and his Olivier Award-nominated dance company, Fabulous Beast, tackle the uncontrollable forces of Stravinsky's infamous Rite.Listen to the podcast here. The double bill opens at the ENO on 6 November. Book here
Check out what's on in the ENO season
igor.toronyilalic
Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is first and foremost a psychological horror. And psychological horrors are all about rocking the mental boat. Capsizing the mental boat. Sinking the mental boat. David McVicar’s production of The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera does not rock the mental boat. He doesn't rock any boat. I'm not sure McVicar is in a boat. He plays the work so supremely safe, so PG-safe, so two-condom safe, that I feel McVicar is nowhere near a boat; I imagine him on dry land, in a deck chair sipping a piña colada, flicking through his Key Stage 1 on Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
At 84 years of age, Sir Charles Mackerras is one of the best-respected and best-loved operatic conductors working in the world today. He conducts Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw for the English National Opera tonight and, despite bouts of ill health, found time to talk about his friendship - and falling out - with Britten, his time conducting the opera under Britten's watchful eye, his experiences in Prague in 1948 as a witness to the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, his pioneering performances of Mozart from the 1960s and his run-ins with Richard Jones and Christopher Alden Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Will UK Gold now be permanently available at the Royal Opera House? Or was Italian TV being beamed into the auditorium last night by mistake? The 1970s scene before us actually just meant the return of Richard Jones’s inspired sitcom treatment of Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi to Covent Garden. Even before the curtain had lifted we were raising a 1970s titter, being prepped for a return to that decade of naughty slap and tickle with an enormous front cloth image of a Viz-like pair of breasts, bursting from their polka-dotted bust darts. In L’Heure Espagnole, we Read more ...
graham.rickson
To a bewitching, shimmering prelude, a back-projected astronaut plants a Czech flag on the lunar surface. So begins one of those evenings where you skip out of the theatre grinning and promising yourself that you will buy tickets for all your opera-disdaining friends.First performed in Prague in 1920, Brouček is the Cinderella among Janáček’s mature operas. Based on stories by the popular nationalist writer Svatopluk Čech about a drunken everyman, the opera had a troubled composition history. Janáček began writing the work in 1908, eventually finishing it in 1918, collaborating with several Read more ...