Opera
David Nice
"Waiting is always wearisome," declare the socialites as glitter-and-be-gay Manon Lescaut receives in the home of her nasty old "protector" Geronte. Despite the numerous sugar-plums Puccini weaves into his first fluent operatic masterpiece, waiting is very wearisome in the first half of Karolina Sofulak's new production for Opera Holland Park. Anticipation that glorious soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn will flourish is eventually rewarded; but laryngitis two weeks ago has left her not in best voice. And her love interest, tenor Peter Auty as Des Grieux, seems worried about catching it, since he Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
It is a coincidence - and probably no more than that - that Garsington Opera has opened its 30th birthday season with the “founding work of modern Czech opera” in the year that also marks the 30th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in Prague.Musically, Bedřich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride is marvellous, vivid, dance-infused work. In the second performance of the run, conductor Jac van Steen and the Philharmonia Orchestra were achieving miracles of clarity, pacing and ensemble with it. The score is peppered with instructions to ratchet up the tempo or to pull it back, or Read more ...
David Nice
All happy 18th century couples are alike, it seems, and that makes for a certain placidity in Gluck's pastoral Bauci e Filomene for the (unhappy) wedding of Ferdinand, Duke of Parma and Maria Amalia, Archduchess of Austria. All unhappy couples are unhappy in different ways, especially if the marital misunderstanding takes place when you're bringing your wife back from the land of the dead. Riveting intensity from two young star singers, Ukrainian mezzo Lena Belkina and Australian soprano Kiandra Howarth, drove home what a masterpiece the work we know as Orfeo ed Euridice truly is, even Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Flirtations and fragile alliances, lies, betrayals, schemes and the ever-present promise of sex – Love Island may be back on our screens next week, but it has nothing on Handel's Agrippina. Imperial Rome is the backdrop for one of the composer’s most deliciously cynical comedies, where love is an afterthought and power is the only game in town.Agrippina is the original tiger mother, conniving to put the Imperial laurel wreath on her son Nero’s head. Kingmaker, ringmaster, seductress, éminence grise – it’s a gift of a role, and one seized with both hands by mezzo Joyce DiDonato, the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
What happens on the stage of Stockhausen’s first opera would fill a book – quite a bad novel – but the plot is simple enough. Michael grows up with a domineering, game-hunting father and mentally unstable mother; discovers sex; passes his exams; travels the globe and finds his calling in life as a visionary and saviour.Premiered in 1981 and last seen in London in 1985, this skimpily veiled autobiography launched a cycle of seven music dramas, one for every day of the week and each of them reinventing from scratch what we think of as opera. The brassy Greeting in the foyer of the Royal Read more ...
Maxime Pascal
Stockhausen stands alongside Monteverdi and Beethoven as a composer who exploded the understanding of his art. Stockhausen deeply changed the relationship between space, time and music; there’s a human, intimate dimension to his composition, and he predicted the future. If Edgar Varèse anticipated the invention of electronic sound, then Stockhausen imagined a theatre of the future, combining electronics with the metamorphosis of the space and the circulation of sound in the concert hall to explore questions of acoustic properties that much newer forms of technology are still probing today. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Mid-career, moving ever further away from composing for concert platform and church towards the stage, Berlioz found himself unsure where his take on Faust belonged. In the end he hedged his bets and titled it a "dramatic legend". Staging it as an opera, as he really wanted, requires the work of a theatrical plastic surgeon. Connective tissue is needed to flesh out the story, to join the four limbs of the work and stitch together its self-contained archetypes of 19th-century music drama: military march, ballet, drinking chorus, archaic ballad and so on.To raise the curtain on Glyndebourne Read more ...
David Nice
Leaving a revival performance of Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a friend asked Hans Werner Henze, also in the audience, that dreaded question: "what did you think?" "Very competent and extremely well performed," came the answer. What snap judgment can one form about Phaedra, his own late mythological fantasia, which also features a bass as the half-man, half-bull, but keeps its labyrinth – in this production, at any rate – to the music and the bizarre wraps around the story of Phaedra's passion for her stepson Hippolytus? Extremely well sung and played by superb young artists, jury out Read more ...
David Nice
Louise Alder, lyric soprano of the moment and vivacity incarnate, had yet to be born when John Eliot Gardiner made his first recording of Handel's Semele with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in 1981. Now they all come together to prove that when it hits the music-theatre heights in Act 3, the first great English-language opera in all but name, premiered 275 years ago, could have been written yesterday. "Sexy," as the advance publicity claimed, it is not, but there's plenty of sensuous music as mortal Semele basks in Jupiter's love, and intense drama as she goes too far in Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North created something approaching a new art form when they performed Wagner’s Ring in "concert stagings", putting their large orchestra in full view, with singers symbolically dressed and given limited front-of-stage space, and a continuous projected screen backdrop. That approach was also used for their Turandot two years ago, and now method and team are reunited as Sir Richard Armstrong conducts Aida with Annabel Arden as director and design by Joanna Parker.The positives are considerable. Gone are conventional stage effects; instead, the performance is aurally stunning, with a Read more ...
Annabel Arden
This will be the latest in Opera North’s acclaimed concert stagings of large-scale works, which have previously included Wagner’s Ring cycle, Puccini’s Turandot and Strauss’s Salome. For Verdi’s Egyptian epic, we’ve recreated the team which brought Turandot to the concert stage, including myself as director, Sir Richard Armstrong as conductor, and designer Joanna Parker, who will be looking after all the visual aspects.I find it exciting to treat iconic works like this because the performances offer a new way to experience classic opera. When you get rid of the proscenium arch, you feel very Read more ...
David Nice
On one level, it's about Biblically informed good and evil at sea, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. On another, the love that dared not speak its name when Britten and E M Forster adapted Hermann Melville's novella is either repressed or (putatively) liberated. The conflicts can make for lacerating music theatre, as they did in Orpha Phelan's production for Opera North. Deborah Warner's ideas are there, but yet confused, to the Royal Opera House audience at least, even after runs in Madrid and Rome. In the bows of the ship, Ivor Bolton's conducting is mostly solid, no more, Read more ...