Opera
Rachel Halliburton
Why stage Don Giovanni in a post #MeToo world? That’s the question most frequently being asked about Mariame Clément’s new production for Glyndebourne and on its opening night she delivered a response that was as conceptually subtle as it was visually flamboyant.Together with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – conducted with flair and vigour by Evan Rogister – she teased out the contradictions and paradoxes that define not just Mozart’s flawed Bacchanalian anti-hero but those who surround him. Today we have cancel culture – back then they had hell – and it’s a tribute to Clément Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Pearl Fishers is very much a mid-19th century Romantic opera, with a plot that’s basically a love triangle set in an exotic location. Its writers, Michel Carré and Eugène Cormon, were not the greatest of plot inventors, and after hearing the opening scene alone, you might think much the same about the inspiration of the music, beautifully crafted though it is.But then there’s that astonishing tune, attached first to the duet for the two men in love with memory of the same woman, “Au fond du temple saint”. Bizet knew a good thing when he wrote one, and he keeps bringing it back again and Read more ...
David Nice
Two recent operas by women have opened in London’s two main houses within a week. Both have superbly crafted librettos dealing with gun violence without a shot being fired, giddyingly fine production values and true ensembles guided by perfect conducting. The main difference is that while Kaija Saariaho’s Innocence feels to me ice-cold musically, and not always coherent with dramatic or vocal possibilities, Jeanine Tesori’s Blue hits us in the guts when it matters most.The game-changer at the London Coliseum is that Blue (a reference to the colour of American police uniforms) features a cast Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Invasion by a colonising power has convulsed a country, dividing families – even individuals – between the rival claims of resistance and collaboration. A captured freedom-fighter from the indigenous elite faces execution; an imperial general hopes to wed his widow and bring a kind of peace to the conquered land.Meanwhile, another local leader has thrown in his lot with the invaders – to the dismay of his rebel children. You can see why the action of Arminio, which Handel saw premiered at Covent Garden in 1737, might appeal to a director with an eye on recent history – or on today’s headlines Read more ...
David Nice
To create a sensitive and original music-drama around the subject of a school killing is a colossal achievement. Director Simon Stone, set designer Chloe Lamford and novelist Sofi Oksanen’s cutting libretto make Innocence seem like a masterpiece. I wish I were less ambivalent about Kaija Saariaho’s score.More trenchant than her previous tapestries of bewitching sounds, it's both superbly conducted by Susanna Mälkki and played with absolute assurance by the Royal Opera Orchestra. From the start, bassoons define writhing ideas of the kind we haven’t often encountered in her music before, other Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Handel’s Theodora – voluptuously beautiful, warm-to-the-touch music, yoked to a libretto of chilly piety about Christian martyrdom in 4th-century Rome. It’s a red rag to directors, and there’s a relief to seeing the oratorio in the concert hall, where the composer is cut free from a lot of acrobatic conceptual wriggling. And really, when it sounds like this, you need nothing more.Back in 2018 Jonathan Cohen and his period group Arcangelo brought Theodora to the Proms. Distant and correct in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, it never quite caught fire. Five years on and Cohen and leading lady Read more ...
Robert Beale
Mansfield Park was written to be a country house opera – that kind where you have a smallish number of performers, no chorus, and the “set” is simply the rooms and furnishings of a gracious residence from an age gone by.Accompaniment was originally four hands on one piano. But the concept soon grew to be more than that: composer Jonathan Dove made a small-orchestra score of its warm and melodious music, and music training institutions realised that with seven out of the 10 roles in the story being young people, they had a gift for their public theatre shows.The Royal Northern College of Music Read more ...
David Nice
Is Korngold a second-rank composer with some first-rate ideas? Most performances of the 23-year-old Viennese prodigy's Die tote Stadt make it seem so. Nearly smothered in glitter and craft, the story can compel – an oblique, promising stance on Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte, about an obsessive widower who thinks he sees his dead wife in a vivacious dancer. Does Annilese Miskimmon, ENO's semi-visible Artistic Director, carry it off?For much of the time, yes. Her collaboration with the best of set designers Miriam Buether and lighing by James Farncombe is especially successful when Read more ...
David Nice
Nearly 40 years old, Andrei Serban’s Royal Opera Turandot feels like a gilded relic (I felt like a relic myself on learning that my writer neighbour wasn’t born when I saw Gwyneth Jones as the ice princess in 1984). Yet so too, outwardly, did Puccini’s only really grand opera when it premiered in the 1920s, exoticism being mostly confined to operettas and musicals. What keeps it modern is the score, which made it vital to hear what Antonio Pappano had to say with it.The Royal Opera’s long-serving, much-loved Music Director will probably beg to differ from a position of infinitely greater Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Childhood fantasies and adult fears – sometimes it’s a fine line between the two. And it’s one that director Liam Steel walks with unerring precision in his ravishing new double-bill for the Royal College of Music: an overflowing toybox of invention and imagination that conceals, right at the bottom, something rather nasty and very real indeed.The production brings together Ravel’s familiar L'enfant et les sortilèges – Colette’s compact fable of a naughty boy who is taught a fantastical lesson in humanity – with a rarity, Respighi’s La bella dormente nel bosco. Premiered in 1922 and reworked Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Like certain other opera companies, WNO has leant in recent years towards popular shows of one kind or another. In their case this is not mere pandering to the Valleys coach parties, but a genuine attempt to assert an identity through an exploration of local south Welsh history. Elena Langer’s Rhondda Rips It Up (2018) was a far from studious romp through the colourful life of the Newport suffragette Margaret Mackworth, Viscountess Rhondda. This time they have gone up-valley and, in Blaze of Glory, come up with a sparkling entertainment about the closing of coal mines in the 1950s and Read more ...
David Nice
Silver rose, golden voices. Richard Strauss calls for four of the best: two sopranos and a mezzo for the love-triangle that develops between a 17-year-old Count, his 32-year-old lover and the girl he falls for at first sight; a bass as one of opera’s strongest if queasiest comic creations, Baron Ochs, Viennese Falstaff, debaucher of maidservants and country girls. Irish National Opera can now bask in the triumph of having cast three native singers of world-class calibre, and a German who sings as generously as he acts making his debut in a role he can now take all over the world.Bruno Ravella Read more ...