Opera
David Nice
Could Gerald Barry's first opera really be as enervating in the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre as it seemed nearly 30 years ago at its Almeida Music Festival premiere? Since then we've become accustomed to wonder at, even love, the Barry style with its shrills and jitters, at least in its wacky takes on known treasures like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Importance of Being Earnest - in operatic form, the funniest operatic comedy since Britten's Albert Herring - and Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Here, though, Vincent Deane's baffling fantasia on creativity and singing in mid- Read more ...
David Nice
It was said of the Venetian audiences randy for the satirical antique of Handel's first great operatic cornucopia in 1709 that "a stranger who should have seen the manner in which they were affected, would have imagined they were all distracted". The same could be said of spectators witnessing this Royal Opera cast for Agrippina going way over the top, and mostly not in the best way: surprising given the rigour with which Barrie Kosky usually directs his singers. Remember - once seen, who could forget it? - Max Reinhardt's visually beautiful film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
You can love Carmen as much as you like (as much as I do, for instance), and still have a certain sympathy for the poor director who has to find something new to say about a work so anchored in a particular style and place. For all its musical and dramatic brilliance, Bizet’s piece is a litter of stereotypes: the wild gipsy girl, the village ingénue, the strutting toreador, the smugglers (all forty or fifty of them), the Spanish dancers, the castanets, the wiggling hips.Jo Davies’s non-solution to this problem is to relocate the work from Seville to somewhere in Brazil - though I only know Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Goethe’s Die Leiden des junges Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was a vital spark in the ignition of the German romantic movement. The story of a young man driven to kill himself for love of a woman, Charlotte, who loves him but marries someone else out of duty to her family, it was first published in 1774. It triggered a fever across Europe ranging from fashion trends (Werther wears blue with a yellow waistcoat) to a spate of copycat suicides. Among its admirers were Beethoven, Brahms, Napoleon and Frankenstein’s Monster. Strange that the only operatic version is by Jules Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Kasper Holten left a mixed bag of productions behind at Royal Opera when he left in 2017, but the best of them - though not all my colleagues on The Arts Desk have agreed - is this Don Giovanni, now back for its latest revival.Visually, the production is stunning. The set (designer Es Devlin) is a full-sized house, onto which videos are projected (video designer Luke Halls). The house rotates, and the projections follow, a high-tech effect that manages to keep the eye tricked for the entire length of the opera. The two storeys of the house create a double-tier set. The action typically takes Read more ...
graham.rickson
Martinů's The Greek Passion is a bold choice as a season opener, all the more so given that Opera North are staging the rarely-seen original version of his 1957 opera. Commissioned for Covent Garden then shabbily ditched, this is faster moving and more cinematic than the radically rewritten edition performed in Zurich two years after Martinů's death in 1959. Based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s bestseller Christ Recrucified, it’s now alarmingly pertinent, a tale of refugees arriving in a small Greek village preparing to stage an Easter Passion play.Christopher Alden’s powerful, spare staging has many Read more ...
Nicky Spence
I’m a big fanboy of Czech music, Janáček and Martinů especially, but I’d never seen The Greek Passion before being cast as Manolios in Opera North’s new production, as it remains quite a rarity in the opera house. For those who don’t know the work, it tells of a group of refugees who arrive in a village as the residents there are preparing for their Easter Passion Play. Martinů explores the community’s reaction to this influx of new people and the conflicting emotions that their arrival engenders.Martinů (pictured left in his American exile in 1943, a a decade and a half before he Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Described as a "performer-led re-devising’"of Mozart’s 1787 opera Don Giovanni - a tale of an arrogant and ruthless lothario who seduced countess women - Don Jo certainly played around with many of the norms we encounter in both sexual relationships and in the operatic genre. Presented by Arcola Participation’s Queer Collective - a performance collective for LGBTQI+ people run as a strand of Arcola’s youth and community work - Don Jo aims to give a voice to those whose stories are often underrepresented on the stage.The piece illuminates many pertinent issues. Consent, power dynamics, Read more ...
David Nice
So we never got the ultimate Proms spectacular, the four brass bands at the points of the Albert Hall compass for Berlioz's Grande Messe des Morts, in the composer's 150th anniversary year. Yet Sir John Eliot Gardiner has learnt how to work the stage - here via director Noa Naamat - so that the performers use his Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique as their sounding board - Glyndebourne, please take note for next year's visit - weaving through it as well as around it, with some of the players sharing in the action. This culminating performance in his four-year Berlioz odyssey, shot Read more ...
David Nice
Can we go back to an older Glyndebourne-at-the-Proms vintage, where the chosen production was merely sketched out with variations suited to the venue, and performed in whatever evening dress might be appropriate? Certainly one wishes that director-designer duo André Barbe and Renaud Doucet’s ingenious wardrobe for their reductive Edwardian-hotel, chefs-and-chambermaids Magic Flute could have been left down in Sussex. This would have given the serious stretches of the piece the simple gravity and musical focus Mozart deserves when he goes deep.Unfortunately this was also an exposure of what Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini's and Abbé Prévost's glitter-seduced Manon Lescaut might have been inclined to linger longer in the salon of dirty old man Geronte if he'd served her up not his own madrigals but Bach's music for various harpsichords and ensemble. Five such concertos gave us a morning of pure pleasure in the light-filled, packed-to-the-rafters surroundings of the wonderful Queen's Hall (★★★★), a sober though appreciative audience sitting and standing around the artists in the converted church like a Lutheran congregation, yet were all but eclipsed by the seductive force of Puccini's first great love Read more ...
David Nice
Love him or hate him, Lars von Trier has time and again made the unpalatable and the improbable real and shatteringly moving in a succession of great films. Breaking the Waves set an audacious precedent. Baldly told, it's a story of a mentally ill, deeply loving woman at odds with her Hebridean community who thinks she can save her paralysed husband by having sex with strangers and describing the acts to him. The numinous outcome requires suspension of disbelief, and in one way opera is equipped to do that. But the art-form is littered with problem plots about sacrificial women, albeit so Read more ...