Opera
stephen.walsh
Wagner’s Tristan left a huge mark on fin de siècle art, on the symbolist poets, even on their pseudonyms; Debussy himself toyed with a four-act opera on the subject. And his version, if he had ever composed it, would have been an intriguing precedent for the Swiss composer Frank Martin’s Le Vin herbé (The Drugged Wine), since both are, or would have been, derived from the same source, Joseph Bédier’s turn-of-the-century novel, Le Roman de Tristan et Isaut, a much more detailed and anecdotal conflation of the various medieval legends than Wagner’s.Martin’s so-called Oratorio profane (1938-41) Read more ...
theartsdesk
Love is in the air. Today, men and women and boys and girls will be pondering how to say it with roses and cards and candlelit dinners: those three words that contain multitudes. As the old strip cartoon never quite got round to saying, love is... the human condition, which is why a good quantity of the culture we review on this site has to do with it. To help you get into the mood for romancing, we have asked our writers to identify something - anything - in the arts that embodies the L word. There are some obvious choices, some obscure ones, and a whole lot of omissions. So, in the comment Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Jonas Kaufmann’s legion of admirers could rest content. A well-received Lieder evening last week demonstrated that the world’s hottest tenor property had returned, both to London for a three-concert residency at the Barbican, and indeed to singing after burst blood vessels had forced several months of rest and cancelled concerts.A welcoming party duly cheered away before he had sung a note of the Wesendonck-Lieder. They had to wait until two lines of the fourth song before savouring the peculiar joys of Kaufmann’s voice at full throttle – appropriately enough, on the phrase "Glory of the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Adriana Lecouvreur deserves to be better known. The opera has a toe-hold in the repertoire, with occasional appearances, usually as a showcase for the soprano in the title role. Its composer, Francesco Cilea, is known for little else, but the opera demonstrates an impressive melodic gift, an ear for orchestral colour, and a rare ability to pace music in step with a complex and extended narrative.This production, directed by David McVicar and with sets by Charles Edwards, was first staged in 2010 and is returning to Covent Garden for a first revival. It is a spectacular affair, if Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
This was supposed to be a triumphant return – one final encore for the production so good that audiences just couldn’t let it go. Instead, this 13th revival of Jonathan Miller’s Mafia Rigoletto seems like an apology. The designs are handsome as ever, the concept as neat, but the details of both direction and music are so scrappy and scattered that the show feels more like a basement clear-out than a loving restoration. Raw, gritty brass launched the Prelude harshly on opening night, setting the tone for an evening where beauty was consistently the last, rather than then first, Read more ...
David Nice
Late January, and the soul longs for winter's end. Which is why Rimsky-Korsakov's bittersweet fairy story about the fragile daughter of Spring and Frost whose heart will melt when she discovers true love, allowing the sun to bring back warmth to earth, is so apt. Unfortunately the time of year is also one for striking singers down, so we missed two of the principals on Saturday night. The good news: their covers were fine enough to carry the charm of director John Fulljames's mostly magical storytelling.It's not easy, given the plot's meanderings, even with major cuts that lop off some of Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
To judge from the hype in advance of this production, you’d think it must be a premiere. In fact Philip Glass’s dance-opera hybrid, written in 1996 and based on Jean Cocteau’s 1950 screenplay, received its first London performance at the Arcola Theatre six years ago. What’s new in this presentation, timed to straddle the Barbican’s “Glass at 80” birthday weekend, is that the work has now passed through yet another extraordinary imagination, that of the choreographer Javier de Frutos. Given his history as a provocateur on stage and off, he has been something of an enfant terrible himself.Yet Read more ...
David Nice
To catch the searing desolation of a lover scorned, you need to be the complete artist, with temperament and technique in perfect equilibrium. Mezzo Christine Rice has taken us from Berlioz's Marguerite and Mozart's Donna Elvira at English National Opera via Birtwistle's Ariadne to Haydn's, and - most taxing of all - the end of an affair by telephone in Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. The abandoned heroines of Haydn and Poulenc found themselves in the most exposed surroundings possible, the intimacy of a song recital in the giving acoustics of Middle Temple Hall, with only a superlative pianist, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Juxtaposition is a powerful thing. Just one day after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the USA and mere hours after women across the world marched in unprecedented numbers to safeguard freedom and champion democracy, the Southbank Centre launched its year-long Belief and Beyond Belief festival with a performance of Fidelio – Beethoven’s blazing operatic hymn to freedom, hope and humanity. The score says it all, wrenches you each time with its dogged optimism in the face of despair and cruelty, its persistent faith. So why director Daniel Slater felt the need to gloss it with Read more ...
David Nice
Young Amadeus is growing up in real time with MOZART 250, Classical Opera's ambitious 26-year project following its hero's creative life from childhood to the grave. 2015's start, marking two and a half centuries since the boy wonder's first visit to London, and its sequel had little to show of its main man, but plenty of other, senior composers flourishing in the same years. A full programme of 1767 told us a different story, with a surprise from the 11-year-old that was a kick in the teeth to those of us who thought Mozart was precocious and prodigious but showed no flashes of genius until Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It takes some pretty special casting to spice up Richard Eyre’s Royal Opera regular, currently returning for its 14th revival (with a 15th on the cards later this year). And that’s exactly what was on the bill here, with house debuts from both Joyce El-Khoury’s Violetta and Sergey Romanovsky’s Alfredo. If the result was at times uneven, it also had an energy, an uncertainty, that gave it a freshness lacking in more polished revivals.Lebanese-Canadian soprano Joyce El-Khoury arrived on the UK radar in 2012, singing Violetta for WNO, followed two years later by an outstanding Pauline in Read more ...
David Kettle
You can tell it’s a big deal when even a handful of London critics abandon the capital for a Saturday evening in chilly Glasgow. And there were more besides in the capacity crowd for Birtwistle’s opera The Last Supper, given a semi-staged performance by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra – seemingly anyone who’s anyone in Scottish music, from international composers to conductors and orchestra heads, and way beyond too. A big deal it most definitely was – and, miraculously, a free ticket too, since it was essentially a radio recording for a BBC Radio 3 broadcast (scheduled for 28 January) Read more ...