Opera
alexandra.coghlan
We’re not good at lack these days. Just look at the concert hall, where increasingly you turn up to find not just an orchestra and soloists but a giant screen. Videos, projections, live speakers, "virtual choirs"; if there’s so much as a chink of an opening in the music, you can bet that someone will try and fill it. It seems to come from a place of generosity, a desire to reach out, to supplement, to amplify, to explain, just in case we didn’t feel or see or understand before. But it’s also a gesture that takes away our agency as an audience, turns us spongy, limp as listeners.English Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Political machinations and backroom power-brokering, leadership battles and unscrupulous rivals – if ever there was an opera for this week it’s Simon Boccanegra. Premiered in 1857 but only coming into its own after substantial revisions in 1881, Verdi’s problem-child of a piece had its own struggle for survival and success, and the work’s rather lumpy dramatic architecture shows the scars of its various grafts and interventions. Elijah Moshinsky’s classic production (first seen in 1991) sweeps grandly over any rough ground though, a gorgeous feast of colour and scope that matches the score Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In a week of flickering memorial candles and cascading poppies we’ve all been asked to contemplate the pity of war – to remember and to seek consolation in beauty and silence. But before we can earn that consolation and mourn in that silence there must surely be rage and noise, bloody specificity before aesthetic abstraction. No composer does rage better than Mark Anthony Turnage, and the return of his First World War opera The Silver Tassie is a bruising, battering experience – a memorial to a conflict we may only know in sepia, but whose wounds were red and raw.Premiered to huge Read more ...
David Nice
Lightness and gravity in perfect equilibrium have always graced Vladimir Jurowski's Stravinsky. From his first London Rake's Progress at English National Opera, proving that he could do the delicate and translucent after his Royal Opera debut conducting Verdi's Nabucco, via the Glyndebourne revival to this, much the most strongly cast, a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert staging – direction uncredited – executed with more ingenuity than several recent productions, Jurowski's sleight of hand has been paramount. Though the finesse is remarkable, there's no need to put words like "emotion" Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
What a scrumptious spread of musical virtuosity the Barbican has laid on with the aid of its international guests this week. A couple of days after the Australian Chamber Orchestra conquered Milton Court, the ace Baroque ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro stormed the main hall with this concert performance of Handel’s farewell opera, Serse. Yes, it sounds deplorably old-fashioned to treat Handel’s musical dramas – Georgian-style – merely as the showground for vocal pyrotechnics. But the high-wire artistry of Argentinian counter-tenor Franco Fagioli, in the title role, could never count as simply some Read more ...
David Nice
Presenting the last Mozart symphonies as a three-act opera for orchestra, as Richard Tognetti and his febrile fellow Australians did on Monday, was always going to be a supreme challenge. It worked, as Boyd Tonkin reported here. Since then, the Barbican's grandiosely-named "International Associate Ensemble" has opened up the repertoire, synchronising with film (on Tuesday) and ending its mini-residency with the kind of vibrant rattlebag for which it's rightly celebrated. How it all added up remains to gel in the mind, but the bonuses were splendid: world-class Australian soprano Nicole Car Read more ...
David Nice
Here it comes - get a grip. The tears have started flowing in the trio "Quid sum miser" and 12 minutes later, as the tenor embarks on his "Ingemisco" solo, you have to stop the shakes turning into noisy sobbing. The composer then lets you off the hook for a bit, but only transcendent beauty in singing and playing can achieve quite this effect in Verdi's Requiem. No one conducts it with more sense of nuance, more space and silence at the right points, than Antonio Pappano, last night giving the perfect base for an outstanding solo quartet, his own Royal Opera Orchestra on top form and the Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
Joseph Phibbs is not the first composer to make an opera out of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, and it is not difficult to see the operatic appeal of this taut, passionate three-handed drama. But there are also hazards: my recollections of the play, reinforced by this operatic interpretation, were that for all the emotional huffing and puffing, not much actually happens, and the final, shocking denouement comes somewhat out of the blue.Juliana, premiered this summer at the Cheltenham Festival, updates the action from 19th century feudal Sweden to the present day. The off-stage presence of the Count Read more ...
David Nice
Supernatural wonders, consciously avoided in Rossini's enlightened tale of goodness rewarded La Cenerentola and unrealised by second-rank composer Isouard in his 1810 Cendrillon, recently uneathed by Bampton Classical Opera, flood Massenet's gem-studded version of the Cinderella story. For a contemporary production to avoid visual representation to match would be foolhardly; but to yoke magic to an alternative narrative can also be confusing. Fiona Shaw's fitfully perceptive but overstuffed cabinet of curiosities is too heavy for the gossamer textures of this total charmer. Young leads and a Read more ...
David Nice
Why are great Wagnerian singers the most down-to-earth and collegial in the world of opera? Perhaps you have to be to master and sustain the biggest roles in the business, ones which can't be performed in isolation, and a strong constitution helps, too. Birgit Nilsson, the farmer's daughter born in rural Sweden 100 years ago, had all those qualities and many more. So, too, does her compatriot and one-time disciple Nina Stemme, making her perhaps the most appropriate laureate of the Birgit Nilsson Prize in terms of carrying on the line (the previous recipients at various intervals since the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
After exhausting years of financial and artistic crisis-management at the Coliseum, English National Opera urgently needed an ironclad, feelgood success. This season’s opener, a somewhat idiosyncratic take on Strauss’s Salome, was unlikely to fit that bill. Despite a couple of niggles, however, I’m happy to report that James Robinson’s full-throttle production of Porgy and Bess steers the rocky boat of St Martin’s Lane home in splendid style. Surprisingly, George Gershwin’s 1935 score – with brother Ira’s, and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s, lyrics – has not played in its full operatic glory on Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There was no synopsis in the programme for the Royal Opera’s concert performance of Handel’s Solomon. Maybe that was an oversight, but perhaps it’s simply because there really is no plot to summarise. Handel’s oratorio, set to an anonymous libretto (who would willingly claim such doggerel?), takes a handful of Biblical books as the basis for a work that’s more cantata or masque than anything else – a splendid, tuneful meditation on love, faith, kingship – oh, and interior design. More time is spent contemplating the spec of Solomon’s palace (cedar coated with gold, FYI) than most Read more ...