Opera
David Nice
While Bach's and Handel's Passions have been driving thousands to contemplate suffering, mortality and grace, this elegy for black lives lost over a century ago also chimes movingly with pre-Easter offerings. First seen in Southampton last year as a commission by 14-18-NOW marking the centenary of the First World War, it relives through song, dance and word the fate of the 618 men of the South African Native Labour Corps who drowned in the English channel when their ship, the SS Mendi, collided with a much larger vessel in thick fog.The very fact that few of us will not even have heard the Read more ...
David Nice
Goethe's cosmic Faust becomes Gounod's operatic fust in what, somewhat surprisingly, remains a repertoire staple. You go for the tunes, hoping for the world-class voices to do them justice and prepared for a pallid quarter-of-an-hour or two. David McVicar's 15-year-old production as revived by Bruno Ravella is beginning to date, Royal Opera trad with a few scandalous add-ons and wacky choreography by Michael Keegan-Dolan. Two things are startling this time round: the conducting of Dan Ettinger, which makes the score sound much more interesting than I remember, and a phenomenon, unique to Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For the final, and only UK, date of his Vinci Arias tour, virtuoso countertenor Franco Fagioli gave an animated and arresting recital of baroque arias at Birmingham Town Hall on Sunday afternoon with the Italian period instrument group Il pomo d’oro. The programme’s premise was to shine a light not only on the music of one of today’s best-known baroque composers - Handel - but also some of his contemporaries, examining how the composers’ relationships and rivalries with one another inspired and affected each their writing. Directed from the violin by concertmaster Zefira Valova, Il Pomo Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music’s spring opera is a theatrical triumph and musically very, very good. It’s 27 years since they last presented what Vaughan Williams called his "morality" – that was a triumph too, and they made a CD of it which I still have. They may not be issuing a sound recording this time, but as an experience in the theatre, it is even more compelling.The quality of the solo performances and of the choral singing is extraordinary. The RNCM clearly has some outstanding young men studying in its vocal faculty these days, and had the opportunity to cast from strength. In Read more ...
David Nice
If you can’t put a name to any of Jack the Ripper’s victims – and spin it however you please, victims they remain – then you shouldn’t buy the publicity about this new opera "bringing dignity back" to the murdered women in question. Isn’t it time to stop feeding the troll/killer, much as Jacinda Ardern did so swiftly and movingly under different circumstances last week, and let the five eviscerated corpses return to dust in peace? Composer Iain Bell, disturbed by their fates from an early age, sincerely thought otherwise. But though he serves up some carefully-considered vocal writing at ENO Read more ...
David Nice
It might be the nature of Handel's operatic beasts, but performances tend to fall into two camps: brilliant in the fusion of drama and virtuosity, singing and playing, or boring to various degrees. If this handsome opening gambit in the 2019 London Handel Festival is a mixture of both, that may be due more to the fact that Berenice is one of the composer's more generic offerings, not in the league of Ariodante or Alcina which also premiered on the Covent Garden site two years earlier (in 1735). Young director Adele Thomas draws a winning and precise physicality from a fine cast, but like so Read more ...
Samir Savant
This is my third year as festival director of the London Handel Festival, an annual celebration of the life and work of composer George Frideric Handel, which takes place every spring in venues across the capital. Our core charitable and artistic objectives for the Festival are to explore the full repertoire of Handel, to bring the composer’s music to broader audiences and to continue his tradition of nurturing young talent. I have always known Handel’s music, having sung it since I was a boy, but it is only in recent years that I have come to discover the complex and loveable character Read more ...
Richard Bratby
A crash, a scurry, a long, lilting serenade – the overture to Rossini’s Elizabeth I sounds oddly familiar. Not to worry. English Touring Opera has anticipated our confusion. “You may recognise this overture” flash the surtitles, to a ripple of laughter, before explaining that yes: this is essentially the same piece, originally composed in 1813 for Aureliano in Palmira that ended up attached to – of all things – The Barber of Seville. Rossini obviously rated it; in fact the overture’s closing section reappears as part of the chorus that closes Act One of Elizabeth I, which is more than it does Read more ...
David Nice
When "Maestro" Riccardo Muti left the Royal Opera's previous production of Verdi's fate-laden epic, disgusted by minor changes to fit the scenery on the Covent Garden stage, no-one was sorry when Antonio Pappano, the true master of the house then only two years into his glorious reign, took over. He's now unsurpassable in the pace and colouring of the great Verdi and Puccini scores. Signs from his previous collaborations with once radical director Christof Loy and the glorious cast assembled were that this time round Forza would be a total triumph. In the end, several mountains gave birth to Read more ...
David Nice
A rum cove sidles up pimping with a tatty business card offering the services of Sonyetka. Not for me, I say, pointing out that in any case she’ll be dead three hours later. "That's more than I know," he says and wanders off to hook other possible clients. Further on, rodent-headed creatures flit by. One seems to be in an altercation with a Rentokil officer. Odd, too, that there should be policemen parading the disco-lit, dilipidated Tower Ballroom on the edge of Edgbaston Reservoir. If you've ever been totally immersed in the Birmingham Opera Company experience - I only had once previously, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Selfish, cunning, cynical, the older generation has screwed up the world with aggression abroad and dishonesty at home. Can their children make it good again? This family drama of transgression and reparation threads through Idomeneo, the opera that Mozart – who had his own troublesome issues with both biological fathers and father-figure patrons – premiered in Munich in 1781. As it lifts the (by then) somewhat musty conventions of opera seria to formerly unimagined heights in a plot about returnees from the Trojan War and the cost their offspring pay for the elders’ bloodstained vanity, Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
What’s the one thing everyone knows about Robin Hood? That he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. So it was quite a brave decision to re-cast Robin as a rapacious Tory shires MP, doing his best to stop the poor becoming rich. At least, I think that was what happened: in much of the story is opaque, even having read the synopsis carefully. But this new new opera by composer Dani Howard has some striking passages, both of excellent singing and beautiful scoring.The Opera Story is a young company in only its third season, but already onto its third new piece. It doesn’t lack ambition: Read more ...