Opera
Miranda Heggie
Yes it’s opera, but not as you know it. The circus-tent style structure, pitched on the grounds of Seedhill sports complex and dubbed "Paisley Opera House", was home this weekend to Scottish Opera's incredible, immersive production of Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. With the opera itself set both onstage and backstage, it was impossible to distinguish between the audience, chorus, cast and crew. The performance truly enveloped the audience, bringing them right into the magic of the storytelling.At its heart, Bill Bankes-Jones's production sought to be fun for everyone involved. The pre-show Read more ...
David Nice
Everything is political in the world's current turbulent freefall. The aim of Riccardo Muti's "Roads of Friendship" series, taking the young players of his Luigi Cherubini Youth Orchestra to cities from Sarajevo in 1997 to Moscow in 2000 and Tehran last year, has simply been "to perform with musicians from different cultures and religions" in a community of peace. Inevitably, though, the resonances are going to be bigger when you join, as happened this year in Kiev, with performers not only from the Ukrainian Opera but also from Mariupol in the strife-torn east, part of an ongoing war the Read more ...
David Nice
It's swings and roundabouts for Glyndebourne this season. After the worst of one director currently in fashion, Stefan Herheim, in the unhappy mésalliance of the house's Pelléas et Mélisande, only musically gripping, comes the already-known best of another, Barrie Kosky. His Royal Opera Carmen and The Nose were half brilliant, half misfire; Handel's cornucopia of invention, never richer, in the very operatic oratorio Saul brings out a hallucinatory vision from Kosky that works from start to finish.The one reservation this time round would have to rest with the characterisation of the Read more ...
David Nice
Two rules should help the non-Donizettian: avoid all stagings of the prolific Bergamasco's nearly 70 operas other than the comedies; and seek the guarantee of top bel canto stylists. Conductor Mark Elder and soprano Joyce El-Khoury certainly fit that bill, and a straight concert performance of L'Ange de Nisida, given at the Royal Opera in association with Opera Rara, got it exactly right. You had to credit the hard work of reconstruction, too, on this opera semiseria which never reached the stage but was expanded, with a similar plot line and several of the same characters, as the relatively Read more ...
David Nice
"When the new god approaches, we surrender, struck dumb". Especially if, for the singer of those words, popular entertainer Zerbinetta, the “new god” takes the shape of same-sex love. Director and designer Antony McDonald locates the real “mystery of transformation” with which Richard Strauss’s house-poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal was so infatuated in the coup de foudre between the not-so-fickle coloratura soprano and another woman as the (usually teenage and putatively male) Composer. That, along with everything else in this stylish, beautifully sung and finely acted production, has an Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What a fabulous score Pelléas et Mélisande is, and what a joy to be able to hear it in a concert performance without the distraction of some over-sophisticated director’s self-communings. Well, if only. What last night’s Prom in fact served up was a kind of abstract of Stefan Herheim’s Glyndebourne production, semi-staged by Sinéad O’Neill without its organ-room setting and all that that entailed, but with a great deal of its dramaturgical clutter still intact. This was emphatically a performance for the radio. I was in the Albert Hall, but I suspect the orchestral playing will have Read more ...
David Nice
Valiant Opera Holland Park, always taking up the gauntlet for Italian operas which should mostly never be staged again. Worst was Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini, where musical ambition vastly outruns technique and inspiration. Mascagni's Iris with its hideous misogyny has now been followed by the same composer's Isabeau of 1911, turgid of libretto and dramaturgy. Leoncavallo's Zazà and Puccini's La rondine are in a different league, but both had already impressed London audiences in concert and at the Royal Opera respectively before travelling westwards. Here the heart sinks to see the same Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Much as I love Strauss’s Ariadne in its final form, I have a sneaking nostalgia for the original version (attached to Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme), which had Zerbinetta and her companions popping up after the final love duet and gently letting out some of its gas. Even in Alan Privett’s sparkling new production for Longborough, the too protracted revised ending threatens to die on its feet, and is kept alive only by the fine singing of the two principals, Helena Dix and Jonathan Stoughton, neither of them exactly sprightly actors, and by superb orchestral Read more ...
Robert Beale
Alzira is Verdi’s shortest opera and his least performed, and you have to ask why. Buxton International Festival has done his legacy a service by bringing it to the stage this year, and it completes the trilogy of early Verdi operas performed there in recent years under Elijah Moshinsky’s direction. Moshinsky sees its relevance to liberation struggles in the present day, with the Incas’ battles against the Spaniards re-presented as Latin American guerillas’ struggles against oppressive government now, or not so long ago.In Giovanna D’Arco in 2015, and last year Macbetto (the original 1847 Read more ...
Richard Bratby
The audience at the Buxton International Festival has a way of cutting to the essence of a production. “They’ll have a job getting all that cutlery out of the sand” commented one of my neighbours after the end of Act One, where in Stephen Medcalf’s staging, Idomeneo (Paul Nilon) has just gone full operatic Mad Scene: hurling chairs, and sweeping an entire dinner service into the piles of sand that comprise much of the set. We’ll come back to the sand later. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that at the opera’s climactic scene, as Idomeneo prepares to sacrifice his son Idamante ( Read more ...
David Nice
Pierre Boulez simply crystallised the obvious when he described Debussy's unique masterpiece as "theatre of cruelty," despite its enigmatic beginnings. Richard Jones, when I asked him to talk about its plot, declared "it's about two men who love the same woman, with disastrous results". Productions by Jones, Peter Stein with Boulez conducting and Vick at Glyndebourne have all had us shaking with fear and weeping with pity. By going much further in symbolic abstraction than even the playwright of Pelléas et Mélisande, Maurice Maeterlinck, could have imagined, Stefan Herheim serves up a frigid Read more ...
David Nice
Opera and music theatre have set the birds shrilling in Regent's Park before in the shape of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess – a very forgettable production – and Sondheim's Into the Woods – much better, and a score which can give any 20th century opera a run for its money in terms of thematic interconnection. Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream would have been the obvious candidate; its earlier, tauter, smaller-scale companion-piece in terms of a very English haunting, The Turn of the Screw, was the more problematic choice for the Open Air Theatre's first collaboration with English National Opera Read more ...