Opera
David Nice
As more musicians emerge from lockdown to conduct, play and sing in audience-less venues - ongoing kudos to the Wigmore Hall for its weekday lunchtime concerts, a fixure for so many viewers and listeners - here are some more off-piste treasures, a past glory from the Royal Opera, a chance to vote for lockdown's musical heroes and what promises to be a compelling discussion on Samuel Beckett translated into opera.Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra and Jurowski back in action Permission to return to their usual haunt was granted to these first-rate players and their brilliant chief conductor Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Rustles of renewal are stirring in the Surrey woods where Grange Park Opera has built the splendid theatre that remains, for this summer, sadly out of bounds. Faced with the cancellation of its 2020 programme, Wasfi Kani’s company has not simply relied, like many others, on a back catalogue of archive videos to keep its audiences onside. For the “Found” season, it has commissioned a series of 15 original performances – some given by artists in their own homes, but some staged in the empty “Theatre in the Woods", with social-distancing measures duly in place. The events, which run until 9 July Read more ...
David Nice
What would have been the festival season starts around now. Some organisations are offering mementos of past glories; others, especially in countries where the lockdown has been relaxed to a greater extent than is possible in the UK, are managing to assemble some of their artists in audience-free auditoriums, playng and singing to you online. All are under varying degrees of financial stress and many may not relaunch; help where you can with donations every now and then.Bergen International FestivalThis large-scale venture - not just about music, of course - launched on Wednesday with an Read more ...
David Nice
How do you render pure goodness interesting? Unorthodox director Dmitri Tcherniakov and radiant young soprano Svetlana Ignatovich make us smile and break our hearts with their take on the maiden Fevroniya: living at one with nature, seeing God in everything and destroyed by her encounter with civic life. There may be a touch too much religion and even putative Russian nationalism of the kind manipulated by Putin in Vladimir Belsky's poetic rendering of a myth, marrying the legend of a saint with the story of a city that vanishes to protect itself from the invading Tatars. But Rimsky-Korsakov' Read more ...
Michael Chance
Where to start? We at The Grange Festival began in mid-March (the 15th) with a letter to our company, all those few hundred who come and work for us during the festival months and who are all, almost without exception, employed on a freelance basis, warning of a likely cancellation but urging a commitment to stage the summer festival over June and July (with preparations stating in mid-April) if at all possible.And then we heard the shocking advice from Number 10 that all those over the age of 70 should stay isolated at home for at least three months. That was the announcement that told me we Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Russia came late to the coronavirus lockdown, and will be leaving early – this evening Vladimir Putin announced that national measures were coming to an end, though the disease still rages there. The country’s theatres were quick into action when the lockdown began, and throughout April and May have been offering plays, ballets and operas online. Publicity for these has been minimal, and English subtitles a rarity (there were none for this performance), but for those who could find them, and then struggle though the language barrier, they have provided a fascinating window on domestic Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Liberated from Pushkin’s salons, ballrooms and bedrooms, Barrie Kosky’s Eugene Onegin bursts out into nature. Tatyana and Olga lounge in the long grass stealing heavy fingerfuls of jam straight from the jar; party-guests run through the trees with flaming torches, dancing wildly, barefoot; after the harvest groups gather on the lawn with picnics and games. This is a world apart, the hot, hazy, endless summer of first love – an intense, but unreliable memory.First seen at Berlin’s Komische Oper in 2016, and later at the Edinburgh Festival, this turn-of-the-century Onegin with its echoes of DH Read more ...
David Nice
So many of the world's great opera singers inviting us to look through the keyhole at a carefully presented version of their lockdown lives over four very variable hours, such bad sound for the most part (Skype, like Zoom, catches the voice but loses the accompaniment). But that's not the point, nor would it be politic to pick out the few turkeys; these were all personable, supremely gifted human beings giving of their time and their artistry to raise money for New York's Metropolitan Opera (how the house has treated its artists and crew financially since lockdown is another matter altogether Read more ...
David Nice
Inventiveness waxes ever stronger, it seems, in quarantine, as do the number of faces and instrumental sounds gathered together at any one time. As the branches diversify, embracing pre-filmed concert and opera, solo and multiple livestreams from home, it made sense not to try and yoke all this together, and to give individual slots to each happening, from two innovative opera productions to a fabulous young cellist playing in his back garden. Opera North's Orchestra plays '2001' plusOrchestral get-togethers online have yielded some fascinating results, including the Lahti Symphony Read more ...
David Nice
A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. There's been real thought behind the wealth of programming in the company's attempts to keep the world happy for free during lockdown, including a whole Wagner week. These two of the top masterpieces by Wagner's natural successor - "Richard the Third", as Strauss was dubbed, because there could be no second - both reminded us of what worked and what didn't when Robert Carsen's sort-of-1920s Read more ...
David Nice
Wagner's final drama, of learning, suffering and redemption through compassion, is second only to Bach's Passions at this time of year, and seems likely to strike a special note in the present crisis. Opera companies around the world, making much in their archives free to view right now, have served up the natural seasonal choice, and they have: there are at least nine choices right now, and they come from the expected centres of excellence including Berlin, Vienna, Munich, New York. Since it's unlikely that most of you would have the time or the patience for more than a few, and since the Read more ...
David Nice
One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration with W H Auden and Chester Kallman is as a numbers opera in nine pictures, four of them indebted to Hogarth's series of paintings/prints. So it's not surprising that visual flair has marked out three significant productions: John Cox’s for Glyndebourne, “starring” David Hockney’s cross-hatched homage to Hogarth in 1975 and still going strong; Robert Lepage’s 1940s Hollywood tale in 2007; and, a decade later, this, Simon McBurney’s contemporary version first seen in Aix-en-Provence (but not so far in the UK, hence our gratitude to Read more ...