Opera
David Nice
“I’m not in the mood” – “non sono in vena” – sings aspiring poet Rodolfo as he settles down to write a lead article. Was it me, or had the mood not settled by the premiere of the Royal Opera’s first new production of Puccini's structurally perfect favourite for 43 years? The singing was good to occasionally glorious, Antonio Pappano’s conducting predictably idiomatic and supportive. So was it wrong to expect our most imaginative opera director, Richard Jones, to have found his own idiosyncratic angle on a fairly unsinkable masterpiece?At the time of directing Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden Read more ...
Richard Bratby
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you have to be pretty silly to take Gilbert and Sullivan seriously. But even sillier not to. And positively heroic to revive the pair’s 1884 three-acter Princess Ida: the show which – updated to a futuristic sushi bar – was responsible in 1992 for one of English National Opera’s all-time great fiascos (well, if you will hire Ken Russell as director...). Vivian Coates’s colourful new production for the National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company keeps the action firmly in the cod-medieval Neverland, lifted straight from Tennyson, that G Read more ...
David Nice
No sunshine without shadows was one possible theme rippling through this diva sandwich of a Prom. Even Richard Strauss's chaste nymph Daphne, achieving longed-for metamorphosis as a tree, finds darkness among the roots; and though Renée "The Beautiful Voice" Fleming has a heliotropic tendency in her refulgent upper register, her mezzo-ish colours are strong, too. Besides, Scandinavians are always aware of transience in sunny summer days, and the outer panels of this curious programme were fine-tuned to that.The opener - "parking-lot music" as another Swedish composer, Anders Hillborg, wryly Read more ...
David Kettle
Skeletal horses; piles of newborn babies smothered in a bloody sheet; a whole garden centre of prickly pears. There’s no denying that Italian director Emma Dante’s new production of Verdi’s Macbeth, which Turin’s Teatro Regio brings to the Edinburgh International Festival, is visually dazzling, even at times hallucinatory.There’s a nagging concern, however, about what all the visual flamboyance actually adds up to – those perpetually procreating witches, seemingly modelled on the long-haired ghoul from Japanese horror film Ring; the imposing crown-formed decors; the circus fire eaters and Read more ...
David Nice
The road to hell is paved with brilliant ideas in Berlioz's idiosyncratic take on the Faust legend. John Eliot Gardiner proved better than anyone in last night's Prom that this splendidly lopsided "dramatic legend" can only be weakened by its many stagings; all the drama is in the music, and especially in the orchestra, from rollicking country dances and fanfaring Hungarians through to the shrieking night birds on the ride to the abyss and the six harps dappling the plains of heaven in what for modern tastes is a quite unnecessary "Epilogue in Heaven" for redeemed Marguerite.Gardiner is a Read more ...
David Nice
"Ura!" as soldiers cry in Russian epic opera's last fling, Prokofiev's War and Peace: supertitles have arrived at the Proms, after much special pleading here and elsewhere. They're needed more than ever in Musorgsky's typically quirky survey of rival interest-groups at the beginning of young Tsar Peter I's reign, though I like to think that newcomers to Khovanshchina ("The Khovansky Business") would have got the message about each formidable personage and scene without them, so vivid was this realisation of the way Musorgsky characterises roistering princes, humble scribes and calm Old Read more ...
Michael Volpe
On the morning of the Grenfell Tower disaster, as the news of the fire gathered pace and gravity, our phones were abuzz with concern for our front of house colleague, Debbie Lamprell, who we knew lived in the tower. We all called her number time and again, sought to reassure one another with optimistic scenarios whereby her telephone may have been left at home as she escaped. My telephone rang again. This time it was James Clutton, our Director of Opera, calling from the base of the tower itself; he’d rushed across London, frustrated at the lack of news of our colleague, and was searching Read more ...
David Nice
So much light in the Glyndebourne production of Brett Dean's Hamlet; so much darkness in Mozart's La clemenza di Tito according to director Claus Guth. Something is irredeemably rotten in the state of ancient Rome, at odds with the fundamental enlightenment and radiance of Mozart's last complete opera. And yet the basis is a sentimental one: two little boys playing around a lake not dissimilar to Glyndebourne's grow up for one – the fundamentally loving Sesto – to betray the other, Emperor Titus. Is the shooting of a wild magpie which betrayed the idyll to be replayed in adult human terms? I Read more ...
David Nice
When Glyndebourne's Music Director Robin Ticciati conducts the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the new production of Mozart's La clemenza di Tito starting tonight, you can be sure that it will sound utterly fresh, startling even. As did their collaboration on two earlier Mozart operas, La finta giardiniera in 2014 and Die Entführung aus dem Serail the following season – and, in a class of its own, his richly vindicated decision to conduct the last three Mozart symphonies with his Scottish Chamber Orchestra in a single evening last October.This three-act orchestral drama, with the Read more ...
Robert Beale
Clonter Opera is a finishing school for young opera performers, with its own well appointed theatre and professional administration and artistic direction, based on a farm in Cheshire near Jodrell Bank. It’s seen a succession of promising young post-conservatoire singers come to perform in fully staged productions for many years, and is also (from an audience point of view) the only countryside summer opera venue of any substance in the north of England. It even manages to accommodate the entire house capacity with proper, covered eating facilities under its roof – appropriate to the local Read more ...
David Nice
What a pity Beethoven never composed an appendage to Fidelio called The Sorrows of Young Marzelline. One crucial moment apart, the music he gives to his second soprano in his only opera isn't his best, but Louise Alder so lived the role of the gaoler's daughter in love with a woman disguised as a man that everything else felt rather less intense. It's only fair to say that there were other singers facing bigger challenges very stylishly, for the most part, but neither they nor the BBC Philharmonic under its chief conductor Juanjo Menja made us feel as though their lives depended on the Read more ...
David Nice
They get to work with the best music and language coaches in the business. They make their mark in small parts throughout the Royal Opera season and showcase their art more prominently at the end of it, proving to the world that there are major talents among them (four outstanding ones, I reckon, on this showing). The big question mark is why, for this crucial event, the Jette Parker singers were saddled with one director, also on the Programme, and a movement co-ordinator who seem to have been little help with the interaction between characters, with feeling comfortable in their skins and Read more ...