Opera
stephen.walsh
One of the features of the converted barn that forms the theatre at Longborough is a trio of statues that tops the front pediment of the building: Wagner, flanked by Verdi on the right and Mozart on the left. No one could question Wagner: Longborough has done him proud. But Verdi, after last year’s dismal La Traviata, and now Mozart, in the dubious light of Martin Constantine’s new Don Giovanni, are looking distinctly uncomfortable as mere attendants at the great Gloucestershire Wagnerfest.I shall struggle to find anything positive to say about Constantine’s Don Giovanni. Set initially – and Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s the saddest music in the world: the quiet heartbeat and falling melody with which Tchaikovsky opens his opera Eugene Onegin. Imagine a whole society, a whole lifetime of solitude, longing and disillusion, evoked in a single bass note and a few bars of tearstained violin. And then imagine it sustained over three acts. Is there another 19th century opera score that matches music to drama so simply, and yet so unerringly? – repeatedly finding the precise turn of melody or twist of harmony required to distil the poignancy out of a situation, and then letting it trickle straight back into Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
On paper, this might seem like a revival too far, a production clearly intended as a vehicle for world-class singers being tacked on the end of the Covent Garden season, and without any big names in sight. But it turns out that Laurent Pelly’s staging, now in its fourth London return, has enough charm and substance to justify an outing with lesser names. And the revival cast is certainly competent, with no obvious weak links, and a sense of ensemble that keeps the hackneyed plot ticking over and the light comedy just on the right side of cliché.The production was designed for big stages – it Read more ...
'A product not only of his era but also of his travels': Ian Page on Mozart's cosmopolitan education
Ian Page
When Mozart was an established composer living in Vienna during the final years of his short life, a young student seemingly came to him to seek his advice. The would-be young composer said that he was planning to write a symphony, and asked Mozart what advice he could give to him. Mozart replied that a symphony was a complex undertaking, and suggested that the youngster should first write a few keyboard sonatas and string quartets before undertaking an orchestral work. The student, however, was indignant. “But, Herr Mozart,” he allegedly retorted, “you were writing symphonies when you were Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The famous ambiguity of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is whether the ghosts that take possession of the two children are real or merely figments of the young Governess’s imagination. Britten’s opera resolves this unequivocally in favour of their reality: they appear alone together, and generally materialise so solidly that it never occurs to you to doubt their real existence. But now Louisa Muller, in her vivid new production for Garsington, casts a fresh and intriguing light on this question. She presents the Governess, the housekeeper Mrs Grose, and the ghostly Miss Jessel as three Read more ...
David Nice
Benjamin Britten's musical mystery tour is still bringing young communities together to work with professionals at the highest level 61 years on from its premiere in a Suffolk church, and Lyndsey Turner's sweet production at Stratford must have been as much fun to be in as any. But Britten also had special concerns about communication, speaking eloquently about a "magic triangle" of three equal points - the work, the performers and the audience. Confine much of Noye's Fludde behind a proscenium arch in an intimate theatre, and you immediately introduce the element of Them and Us. Place the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
When you think of the extravagant, violent, super grown-up subject-matter that stalked the operatic stage round about 1900 - the Toscas and the Salomes, the Cavs, the Pags and the rest of the verismo pack - you might find it strange to contemplate the ageing Dvořák still messing around with fairies at the bottom of his woodland pool, a subject that surely went out with the early Romantics. But you’d be wrong. His Rusalka is just as much a creature of the distressed mind as the heroine of Schoenberg’s Erwartung or, for that matter, Debussy’s Mélisande, who could well also be a stranded Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a clever decision to pair Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. The first is all about happily-ever-after, while the second is all about what happens next. The optimistic grime and smog of 1950s London gives way to the shrink-wrapped brightness and professional happiness of the suburban American dream, smiles freeze into toothpaste-commercial grins and love curdles into quiet domestic despair.A Dinner Engagement wrestles its happy ending to the ground by sheer persistence and determination. The parents are poor, the dinner is burnt, the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As midsummer night’s dreams go, it would be hard to surpass the darkly enchanting collaboration between Sir Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars that will bring The Cunning Little Vixen to the Barbican again this evening and on Saturday. Janáček’s spellbinding vision of humans and animals caught up in the inexorable cycles of nature and time has its rough and scary side, of course. And you will probably hear and see gentler, more obviously charming, versions of the opera that in 1924 proclaimed Janáček’s late-life burst of untamed creativity.Sellars’s semi-staged production (originally mounted in Read more ...
David Nice
If ever there was an instance of the great being the enemy of the good, it happened after all the live singing on Saturday night. This year we all remember, with sadness for his early death and amazement at his burning, burnished talent, the Siberian baritone Dmitry Hvorostovsky (1962-2017), winner in 1989. He was up against Bryn Terfel, no less, and those clips of a few seconds' singing from each competitor, witnessed not just on television but also by the audience in Cardiff's St David's Hall, were electrifying. Nothing may have been quite on that level this year - the last time anything Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Politics, in case you may not have noticed, has been in the air of late: questions of escape, release, borders, refugees, things like that. So WNO’s June season of operas about freedom has been suspiciously well timed. We’ve had the dead man walking (Jake Heggie’s opera, but you may have your own candidate), we’ve had Menotti’s visa opera The Consul, Dallapiccola’s study of hope deceived in Il prigioniero, and Beethoven’s of despair conquered by woman in Fidelio. To fit Hans Krása’s children’s operetta Brundibár into this topical gallery takes some special pleading, because although the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Cut almost anywhere into the lesser-known seams of Handel’s oratorios and you may strike plentiful nuggets of the purest gold. It may not be quite the case that Handel's Belshazzar, its score studded with nearly-forgotten musical treasures, has entirely disappeared from view. A decade ago, the Berlin Staatsoper staged an all-star operatic version of this work from 1744, which later travelled to the Aix-en-Provence festival. William Christie and Les Arts Florissants have recorded a meticulous account, and given it in concert here.But as a fully-staged piece, as The Grange Festival’s Read more ...