Opera
David Nice
Full marks to the Royal Opera for good planning: one first night knocking us all sideways with the darkest German operatic tragedy followed by another letting us off the hook with a short comedy by Wagner’s compatriot Telemann. The premiere of Pimpinone predates that of Die Walküre by nearly a century and a half and we mark its 300th anniversary this year. But is it too slight for resurrection?Initially I wondered. The first of Telemann’s three acts, each originally placed as an intermezzo within the composer’s adaptation of Handel’s opera seria Tamerlano for his polyglot city of Hamburg Read more ...
David Nice
Wagner’s universe, in the second of his Ring operas which brings semi-humans on board to challenge the gods, matches exaltation and misery, terror and tragedy – and throws down a gauntlet to singers, orchestra and director capable of going to extremes with due discipline.They did so masterfully last night, thanks above all to Royal Opera Conductor Laureate Antonio Pappano’s close relationship with four remarkable Wagnerian principals and Barrie Kosky’s dark, spare but always perceptive production, offering the revelation that any new Ring cycle has to provide."It's that woman again," declared Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North have recently pioneered a way of presenting some big works which they call “dramatic concert stagings”, performing in concert halls as well as theatres, with the orchestra on the platform behind the singers and a minimalist set, and the principals in present-day costumes symbolic of characters’ type.Some have had video projection as a backdrop, but it’s also been dispensable where necessary. This one has none, but the concept is much more than a concert performance and completely justified by its impact in theatrical terms.They’ve opened in St George’s Hall, Bradford, as an early Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Emotions run high at WNO these days. When the company’s co-directors, Sarah Crabtree and Adele Thomas, feel impelled to take to the stage at the end of the first night of Peter Grimes, in front of the entire company, chorus, orchestra and all, you know that matters have reached a pass that only a massive show of enthusiastic solidarity can hope to assuage.Enthusiasm there was in plenty: stamping and yelling, cheering and clapping from a packed house of opera-lovers young and old who plainly wanted it to be heard in the horrible Senned building next door that the Land of Song was still in good Read more ...
Robert Beale
It’s quite ironic that the Royal Northern College of Music should have invited, as director of this, Britten’s avowedly pacifist opera, Orpha Phelan – whose version of his Billy Budd for Opera North nearly 10 years ago contained one of the most thrilling battle scenes ever staged.And, in her presentation of Owen Wingrave, war is not merely talked about, but seen. That’s very much to the good, as Myfanwy Piper’s libretto makes the adaptation of Henry James’ story very talkative: until very near the end, you might say all the action is in the dialogue.Much can be made of the fact that the opera Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Over the last three years of the London Handel Festival, two experimental productions have proved to be highlights – not just of the festival itself – but of the musical year. In 2023, Adele Thomas’s In The Realms of Sorrow brought sweat, muscularity and subversion to four of Handel’s early cantatas with stunning effect. In 2024, Aci by the River introduced a darkly witty take from director Jack Furness, transporting us up the Thames and on to a film set where the Cyclops was incarnated as a tyrannical Italian film director.But it’s the nature of creative experiment that while sometimes you Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Just now, the notion of a long-term project that concludes in 2041 sounds like an optimistic bet on the far future worthy of some 18th-century Enlightenment philosophe – Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, maybe. The musicians of The Mozartists are clearly hoping for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as their MOZART250 programme ambitiously tracks, in annual increments, the music that Wolfgang Amadeus wrote exactly 250 years ago.We’ve reached 1775, and thus last night saw a concert performance at Cadogan Hall of La finta giardiniera, written by already-accomplished late-teenager for the Read more ...
David Nice
So much looked promising for Irish National Opera’s first Wagner: the casting, certainly, the conductor – Music Director Fergus Sheil knows and loves this music – and the venue (the Libeskind-designed Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, proven ideal for Richard Strauss). How could a production go wrong with such a theatrical romantic tale, a pioneering music-drama for its time (1843)? All too easily, it seems, by either coming up with inappropriate business or letting the singers stand and deliver.Yes, we had blood-red sails and the deck of a ship for Wagner's Act One, which will come as a relief to Read more ...
David Nice
Tamino in the operating theatre hallucinating serpents? Sarastro’s acolytes wheeling lit-up plasma packs? From the central part of the Overture onwards – just when we thought we'd escape directorial intervention in Olivia Clarke’s racy conducting - Jamie Manton’s production of Mozart's adult fairy-tale looks distinctly unpromising. But by Act Two, it becomes one of the most moving Magic Flutes I’ve ever seen. Glorious singing and youthful energy help to make it so.So do the high-tech design of Justin Nardella and sometimes deliberately uncomfortable lighting of Charlie Morgan Jones. Neon Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s call it Jane Austen fit for the West End, but with opera singers. The fact that it also serves as a fun ensemble piece for students is also very much in favour of Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park, with a neatly telescoped and often witty libretto by Alasdair Middleton. Like his latest work, Uprising, a community opera for Glyndebourne staged at the weekend, it presses all the right buttons for the young, while staying within safe and mostly derivative boundaries.Act One is delicious: think "A Weekend in the Country" from Sondheim's A Little Night Music, brio set up with sung chapter Read more ...
David Nice
The score is effective, and rewarding to perform, but derivative. The libretto uses every cliché, or truism, about save-the-planet youth activism in the book; it’s didactic, not dramatic. Direction, design and lighting sometimes feel unfinished. Yet as a youth/community opera, Glyndebourne’s latest educational project hits the mark; the commitment of singers and players young and old, professional and amateur, makes the ends justify the means.The only other Glyndebourne education project of this sort I’ve seen live, Nothing by David Bruce with a libretto by Glyn Maxwell, began, like this one Read more ...
theartsdesk
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic team of arts and culture writers went ahead with an ambitious plan – to launch a dedicated internet site devoted to coverage of the UK arts scene.Many of our readers today may have forgotten the arts journalism atmosphere of the first decade of the new century – especially the decimation of traditional broadsheet arts coverage that followed the financial crisis of 2008.Many of the contributors who came together for Read more ...