Opera
Robert Beale
Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’étoile is not exactly a French farce, but it comes from a post-Offenbach era (1877 saw its premiere) when cheerful absurdity was certainly expected, especially at Offenbach’s old theatre, the Bouffes Parisiens.In some ways it resembles Gilbert and Sullivan’s later creations – a topsy-turvy land of eccentric royal customs, where public executions must be routine and the titled and privileged are out to keep their wealth and status through convenient marriages (shades of The Mikado and The Gondoliers in the plot-line).In this case King Ouf’s birthday is to be celebrated Read more ...
David Nice
“Comedy is a serious thing,” quoth David Garrick. Gilbert and Sullivan knew it, and so does Mike Leigh, having bequeathed to ENO a clear and unfussy Pirates of Penzance. It does renewed honour to Victorian genius in Sarah Tipple’s freshly-cast revival. Most striking of all, perhaps, is how seriously conductor Natalie Murray Beale takes each musically rich number, vindicating Sullivan’s reputation as more than just a tunesmith to match Gilbert’s endlessly sharp and funny words.Fusion between pit and singers often attains perfection. William Morgan (pictured below with Isabelle Peters) as Read more ...
David Nice
How many Rigolettos have regular operagoers among you sat through where there wasn’t some major defect, in either the production or the three major roles? Here, there is none. INO’s jester and Duke are well cast, its Gilda supernaturally perfect in music and acting, while Julien Chavaz’s production, despite a few passing irritations, adds up to a coherent and disciplined whole. INO Artistic Director Fergus Sheil keeps Verdi's vivid music theatre on the move.Do Irish audiences know how lucky they are to see world-class opera again and again? Last night's full house, in marked contrast to the Read more ...
David Nice
Sparkling Italian comic opera might have been just the tonic at this time. Trouble is, the bar was set so high recently by Wexford Festival Opera’s Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali, aka Viva la Mamma, that this better known, less malleable if more romantic Donizetti comedy came across as flat, one-dimensional and not very funny (I laughed out loud once; maybe I need to get out less). Which is a shame, because the singers deserved better.They already faced three big problems. First, the spaces at the Coliseum – too big an auditorium for an intimate comedy, albeit with a major role for Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
What does it mean to have a voice? And what does it mean to lose it? Those are the questions the award-winning Sound Voice Project has explored – through research, collaboration and live performance – since its beginnings in 2016. The latest incarnation of composer Hannah Conway’s project is as “immersive digital opera performance installation”.Down in the bowels of the Royal Opera House, as far away from the hum and chatter of the foyer crowds, the massed voices of the main auditorium, cocooned in an artificially darkened, shrunken Linbury Theatre, we’re invited to meet people whose voices Read more ...
David Nice
Having all but sunk one seemingly unassailable opéra comique, Bizet’s Carmen, director Damiano Michieletto goes some way to helping out another with so many problems. Not far enough, alas, but the chosen edition, with its reams of recitative (mostly not by Offenbach), doesn’t help. Nor does the theme of women as either dolls, angels or devils. The real Hoffmann did it all so much better.Never mind: this is where we are, so how well are the tales of the poet’s three loves and the frame in which a fourth battles it out with a demon and a muse sung, played and directed? There are some Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after decade. Well, Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York mafiosi version of Verdi’s Rigoletto first arrived on stage in 1982, after The Godfather (Parts I and II) but well before The Sopranos. For ENO at the Coliseum, Elaine Tyler-Hall has now directed its 14th revival. ENO has lately borne the brunt of drive-by funding massacres by the ruthless (and opera-loathing) capi who control the UK arts-subsidy game. We get the appeal of guaranteed crowd-pleasers and Read more ...
David Nice
Name three operas framing dramas within, and you’d probably come up with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges. You might be harder pressed to come up with three more, but Wexford Festival Opera has done just that, theming this year’s triptych of rarities in the shape of never less than interesting, if often dramatically flawed, comedies by Donizetti, Mascagni and Stanford as “Theatre Within Theatre”.Nothing sinks to the dud level of Halévy’s La tempesta in 2022 or Erlanger's L’aube rouge last year. And nothing in the state-of-the-art Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Having premiered at the Lammermuir Festival earlier this year, Daisy Evans’s new production of Britten’s Albert Herring is a gently funny and sweetly nostalgic telling of what’s essentially a coming of age comedy. In fact, the 80s costumes and the characters’ cute quirks wouldn't have felt out of place in a John Hughes movie – if Hughes set films in Suffolk. The opera, based on the short story Le Rosier de Madame Husson by Guy de Maupassant, takes place in the quaint village of Loxford, and opens with the town’s well-to-do discussing which young lady should be the year’s May Queen. None Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
Ten years ago, Ian Page launched his and the Mozartists’ (then Classical Opera’s) remarkable endeavour to play music by WA Mozart 250 years after it was written, starting with a programme of material from 1765 by eight-year-old Mozart, and his contemporaries.Page said at that moment: “When we play this music, I can bank on half the critics pointing out that it’s not as good as Figaro. But what matters is that Mozart could and would not have written Figaro had he not written these early pieces in the extraordinary way he did.”The series will conclude in 2041, when the conductor Read more ...
Robert Beale
Martin Duncan’s 2008 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of the best and funniest things Opera North has ever done – back now again (it was also seen in 2013-14), in the company’s autumn season of revivals.The idea, hinted at in the staging and suggested in its original publicity, that Britten’s vision of Shakespeare’s enchanted world could be presented in terms of “psychedelia” and even likened to an acid trip, on the grounds that those things were part of the 1960s and Britten completed his opera in 1960, is, strictly speaking, a minor anachronism. Such things came late in Read more ...
David Nice
At first, you wonder if the peculiar voice of Henry James’s maybe unreliable narrator can be preserved in this production. Surely the outcome is known if we first meet the Governess in an insane asylum bed? Yet whether she was mad or maddened during the course of terrifying events 30 years earlier remains crucially unclear. Between them director/designer Isabella Bywater, soprano Ailish Tynan and conductor Duncan Ward deliver all the frissons in Britten’s concentrated masterpiece.Bywater shows she knows the novella and the opera equally well in possibly the most intelligent programme essay I' Read more ...