Opera
David Nice
British opera’s attempted answer to The Magic Flute, and its presentation as the opening gambit of Edward Gardner’s eminent position as principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, leave me queasily ambivalent.After all the smoke and lighting of the LPO’s online series, there’s barely a hint of theatricality in this plain concert performance, with the only concession to lighting the constant red on the Royal Festival Hall organ: is it not an opera but a choral symphony with eight soloists? Then you remember what wonders good directors and designers have achieved with The Read more ...
theartsdesk
Few singers really change your life. Norman Bailey did that for me [writes David Nice of theartsdesk]. The occasion wasn't my first experience of a Wagner opera, but it was the first time I'd been to a performance of his great human comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, during the early 1980s on one of Scottish Opera's visits from Glasgow to the vast barn of Edinburgh's Playhouse.The central figure who slowly steps into the limelight is an operatic version of the real-life 16th century poet-philosopher and shoemaker Hans Sachs. Act Three changes from extrovert comedy and lyricism to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Rarely has the revolving door of opera twirled so efficiently. David McVicar’s venerable production of Rigoletto may have exited the Royal Opera on Monday (presumably with one final squeak of protest from that pesky revolve), replaced by a shiny new incumbent, but by Wednesday the director was back on the stage with another of his long-lived classics: The Magic Flute.We may be approaching the show’s 20th anniversary, but visually it’s still serving up the goods. After a year of digital screens and chamber restrictions, black-box sets and two-handers, John Macfarlane’s lavish designs and the Read more ...
David Nice
Another season, another new production of Verdi’s nastiest masterpiece. For which we should be profoundly grateful after the tribulations of the last 18 months. Yet how quickly elements of the routine can corrode the soul of the spectator, just as fresh, urgent communication can set it alight.That communication Royal Opera Music Director Antonio Pappano displays with a true magician’s sense of pace and sleight of hand, deftly transitioning from hollow comedy to ugly tragedy, alert as ever to the needs of his soloists, and the Royal Opera men’s chorus is with him all the way. On the other hand Read more ...
theartsdesk
The bleakest time of all for live music during the Covid crisis came in the first four and a half months of this year. Re-emergence came too late for many of the big national opera companies – though the Royal Opera threw down a sensational gauntlet with Richard Jones's new production of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito – but the summer houses were under pressure to start delivering, beginning with Glyndebourne in mid-May.That their directors, CEOs, call them what you (or they) will, and their tirelessly hard-working teams managed to do so much for musicians starved of work makes them, surely, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Welcome back, WNO! Yes, emphatically, and with a loud hurrah, which is precisely what the company received, and rightly received, from the somewhat arbitrarily scattered first night Millennium Centre audience for their opening revival of The Barber of Seville. But what possessed their new(ish) General Director, Aidan Lang, to celebrate the return, with all its lively hopes for the future, by digging up Giles Havergal’s 35-year-old production of Rossini’s masterpiece, is a mystery I am unable to unravel.Havergal’s stage-within-a-stage concept perhaps seemed chic and suitably postmodern in 1986 Read more ...
David Nice
“Now I’ve conducted Tristan for the first time,” the 27-year-old Richard Strauss wrote from Weimar to Wagner’s widow Cosima in 1892, “and it was the most wonderful day of my life”. Robin Ticciati, over a decade older but still young in terms of his profession, has just crowned his first run of Glyndebourne Tristans with this Proms performance, and I don’t know whether he felt the same on opening night; but it’s clear that with the house’s latest music director a new golden age of Wagner conducting has begun.You could sense it in the London Philharmonic Orchestra cellos’ opening tone-swell, Read more ...
Douglas McDonald
This lively interpretation of Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera provides a feast for the senses as a musical highlight of the Edinburgh international Festival. As with the rest of the festival’s 2021 programme, the opera is performed outdoors, in a hangar designed to protect the audience from the Scottish elements and to allow for social distancing.While the venue has proven challenging for some concert performances, it feels appropriate for the setting of Ariadne auf Naxos.The two-hour show is an excellent choice for a slightly chilly evening, as Strauss delights in revealing the Read more ...
David Nice
Feet firmly planted on fertile native soil, but always open to the world, lyric-dramatic soprano Birgit Nilsson soared into realms no-one from the rolling hills and coastline of Sweden’s Bjäre peninsula, where she grew up, could possibly have imagined. The Met, Bayreuth, and all the other great opera houses of the world fell over themselves to acquire stakes in her special incandescence, but she always returned to her home region.Her parents’ farmhouse became a summer home, and their only child laid flowers on their grave when she gave recitals in the church at Västra Karups where she’d sung Read more ...
theartsdesk
Five weeks have passed since the death of opera director Graham Vick from complications due to Covid-19, shocking even to those of us (un)prepared for the worst, and yet so many of us think about him every day. For the musicians, actors, dancers and stage crew he worked with, he's still among us, and he lives on in the hearts and minds of the ensemble he forged over years of developing his Birmingham Opera Company.A personal note on why I'm so stricken before I hand over to those who had far more creative experience of his vision. I first saw his productions when I was a student at Edinburgh Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
This delectable Prom hid behind the title "To Soothe the Aching Heart" the failsafe concept of a programme of the world’s favourite opera extracts, plus some. Take six British opera stars – three sopranos, two tenors and a mezzo – and assign them the business of comforting us all.Whether you felt soothed by what followed wasn’t really the point; this was a gulp-it-down sundae of a Monday night, a feast of indulgence in which the singers, who probably needed comforting too after more than a year of cancelled contracts, simply gave everything, mixing, matching and sometimes hitting the high Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s hard to know where to start with this chaotic Hansel and Gretel, and not just because Humperdinck’s opera has been cut, spliced and re-stitched with a brand-new libretto, new characters and multi-track, multi-option audio. The restless, competing ideas, the gaudy design, the ill-judged tone, the fussy technology all conspire against the performers, who produce some fine singing despite everything.What makes it all the more enraging is the fact that, as British Youth Opera’s CEO Nicola Candlish reminded us before the performance, these near-professionals have, in many cases, lost months Read more ...