Opera
David Nice
When are the big international opera houses going to wake up to the great British talent that is Elizabeth Llewellyn? With her opulent soprano – shaded middle register, full bloom at the top, cutting chest voice – she was born to sing Verdi and Puccini, and her stage presence is undeniable from the moment she steps out. English National Opera threw her a few roles – Micaëla, Mimì, Mozart's Countess – but then seemed to pass over her in favour of American sopranos. Now Opera Holland Park has showcased her brilliance in an opera made for a London summer night – Puccini' Read more ...
stephen.walsh
This last of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s semi-staged Monteverdi series took us back practically to the very start of the whole genre. L’Orfeo was presented in Mantua in 1607 as a court opera, and will have been seen and heard by a fraction of the number of people who crowded into Bristol’s Colston Hall on Sunday night. Between then and the Ulysses of 1641 the first public theatre opened in Venice, and the whole nature of opera was transformed.Anyone who has come across the madrigal group I Fagiolini’s Full Monteverdi performances will have an idea of how L’Orfeo emerged from the madrigals of Read more ...
David Nice
There are certain roles where you’re lucky to catch one perfect incarnation in a lifetime. I thought I'd never see a soprano as Natasha in Prokofiev's War and Peace equal to Yelena Prokina, Valery Gergiev’s choice for Graham Vick’s 1991 production. When Vick directed a radically different take, also at the Mariinsky, in 2014, the Natasha was 25-year-old Aida Garifullina, born in Kazan so like Nureyev and Chaliapin a Russian of Tatar origins. Not only was she as beautiful and as youthful in spirit as the interim incumbent, Anna Netrebko, but like Prokina she seemed to live the intense emotions Read more ...
David Nice
Men playing boys playing girls, women and men, all female parts convincingly falsettoed and high musical standards as backbone: Sasha Regan's single-sex Gilbert and Sullivan has worked a special magic on Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore and now The Mikado, not so much. Energetic song and dance are still in evidence. But this time a hard-worked scout-camp setting – located, as advance publicity tells us to expect, some time in the heyday of Enid Blyton – brings very little to highlight Gilbert's immortal preoccupations with class and hypothetical sadism.Familiar Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This was a very fine concert indeed, plus a lot more. The first half was a very carefully planned series of unveilings around the theme of Béla Bartók and Hungarian folk music, the second an overwhelming performance of his Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.The evening started with conductor Iván Fischer evoking the crucial incident in Béla Bartók’s life when, newly graduated as pianist and composer, he was mesmerised by the folk singing of Lidi Dósa, a peasant girl from Gerlice. It was that experience which led him to head off to the villages of Hungary and Transylvania with Zoltán Kodály to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
A Saudi princess in her white wedding dress digs her own grave as men pile up stones to hurl at her head — next, an Isis fighter is stabbing a knife at her neck to decapitate her. Ah, the fate of the heroine of the average baroque opera about the appalling ways of men and gods. Add in the bearded lady in a burqa, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry on the opening day of the new Glyndebourne season. Graham Vick’s production of Francesco Cavalli’s 359-year-old opera Hipermestra is certainly extremist opera.Yet what an extreme opera this is. Here is a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Until yesterday my only experience of the Welsh language in the opera house was a few isolated passages in Iain Bell’s In Parenthesis last year and the surtitles WNO routinely put up alongside the English in the Millennium Centre. Now Guto Puw, a 46-year-old composer from north Wales, has written an entire opera for Music Theatre Wales and the Carmarthen-based Theatr Genedlaethol in this beautiful language of which I’m ashamed to say I know not a single word apart from a handful of road signs and the unexpected pepperings of English (“Electric – Price – Bloody Job” was one whole phrase I Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To hear The English Concert playing Handel is to arrive in technicolour Oz after a lifetime of black and white baroque in Kansas. We’re not short on period bands in the UK, but few bring this music into anything like the kind of focus that Harry Bicket and his crack team of musicians achieve, nor demonstrate such love and joy in the process. The solo line-up may have been starry, but the hero of this Ariodante was the orchestra.Even by Handel’s standards, the plot of Ariodante is a curious one. A happy beginning and ending frame a central conflict of disturbing darkness (a Much Ado-style Read more ...
graham.rickson
I’ve seen the future, and it’s semi-staged. The gains here are far more significant than the losses. And where Opera North’s minimalist Leeds Town Hall Ring let Peter Mumford’s video projections fill in the gaps, this new production of Turandot is costumed, lit and directed, lacking only a backdrop. The chorus are squeezed stage right, tightly crammed into the choir seats. The cast gamely do their thing in the narrow space betwixt strings and stage.For such a macabre, dark work, there’s an awful lot of grinning going on – notably from Opera North’s on-form orchestra, gleefully let off Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever musicologists may tell us about the patchy authenticity of Monteverdi’s last two operas, they unquestionably make a pair. Il ritorno di Ulisse is all about fidelity and ends with a love duet between the reunited husband and wife. L’Incoronazione di Poppea is almost entirely dedicated to infidelity and ends with a disturbingly beautiful love duet between the adulterous couple, Nero and Poppea, after he has exiled his wife, Ottavia, and ordered his moralising tutor, Seneca, to kill himself, among other equally vicious, if slightly less murderous, diktats.Happily Monteverdi’s only other Read more ...
David Nice
Bomb-dropping is the new black again in Trump's dysfunctional America. Awareness of that contributed to the crackling cloud of dynamic dread hanging over last night's concert staging of John Adams's opera-oratorio - my description, not his - about the July 1945 desert testing of the plutonium bomb under the supervision of self-divided Robert Oppenheimer, an American Faust. But then the music's insistent stepwise descents towards the centre of the earth, in various modes and illuminated colours, the claustrophobic volume of much of the variegated score in the no-escape close-ups of the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
"But is any of this normal?," asks poor Beatriz at the end of Act One. Of course not. She and 14 other grand creatures are crossing the space of an aristocratic drawing-room from which, they are coming to realise, there is no escape. At the same time, it’s completely normal. This is opera.What appalling fun Thomas Adès has with the business of opera in The Exterminating Angel, given its UK premiere last night by the Royal Opera. Its conventions, faults, virtues, singers, audiences, even conductors: all are skewered by a pen of poison-tipped invention. Imagine chomping your way through an Read more ...