Opera
Linda Esther Gray
When I sang Isolde to Alberto’s Tristan at English National Opera all those years ago, it was a joy to hear such wonderful tenor sounds in my ears, my heart and my soul. It was always difficult for him to memorise his work and up until the first night I wasn’t quite sure what was going to happen. Yet when we went into that other place of performing he became Tristan and we travelled, on the waves of his beautiful sounds, to places I have seldom been.He was a very experienced singer who had sung with many great sopranos but I always got the feeling he was enjoying his time with me as much as Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Memo to self: never read the director’s programme essay. Jacob Dorrell, director of the University of Birmingham’s summer production of Britten’s The Beggar’s Opera at the Barber Institute, explains: “I wanted to bring to the Barber stage a community of people one would never expect to appear in an opera: today’s working-class community.” Dorrell is a young director, early in his career, so let’s leave aside the fact that his vision of “today’s working-class community” – a world of jeggings, leopard print, trackie bottoms and midriff-baring maternity wear – seems to come out of Coronation Read more ...
David Kettle
It just goes to demonstrate the breadth and ambition of the Hebrides Ensemble’s work. For its 25th anniversary, the Scottish new music group (although its output delves a bit further back in time than that description might suggest) had commissioned a brand new chamber opera from Inverness-born Alasdair Nicolson, unveiled at Glasgow’s Cottier Chamber Project festival, with subsequent performances at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre and Orkney’s St Magnus International Festival, where Nicolson is artistic director.To be honest, though, The Iris Murder was a pretty mystifying experience, as Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Is The Cunning Little Vixen a jolly children’s pantomime, or is it a searching study of issues of life and death, Man and Nature? The answer, naturally, is that it’s both. Children dress up as animals, and sing and prance about. But at the same time grown-ups (both animal and human) dream and fantasize, couple and procreate, hunt and kill. Remarkably, it’s a tragedy that leaves no bitter taste. The heroine dies, but Nature goes on. The hardest thing to understand about hunters is that they identify with and even love their prey. But this is precisely the crux of Melly Still’s brilliant Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Boy meets girl; girl and boy fall in love; boy loses girl. In true bohemian fashion, La bohème can lay its operatic head anywhere from Paris to Peshawar, in any era from 90s punk to the Belle Epoque, and still make sense. What matters are the emotions; do we believe in the relationship between Rodolfo and Mimi, the camaraderie between Rodolfo and his friends? Stephen Barlow’s new production for Opera Holland Park may relocate the action rather unexpectedly, but what emerges both fresh and familiar is a love story between two people who couldn’t care less what city or what age they find Read more ...
Helen Wallace
Nothing galvanises an audience quite like physical risk. As soprano Sarah Tynan rose on a hoop into the darkness, intoning the final words of "Départ" from Britten's song cycle Les Illuminations, you could almost hear her heart race. Beneath, a troupe of circus performers held the rope – and her life – in their hands.In choreographer/director Struan Leslie’s vision, performers decked out as Rimbaud’s "sturdy rogues" brought sinew, grace and heart-stopping spectacle to a night illuminated by explosive, raw-fresh string music: it was all about the vertical.For Leslie, Rimbaud’s Les Read more ...
David Nice
"Bad Star Trek episodes" is how one director describes a certain unfortunate look in would-be intergalactic opera productions. The late Nikolaus Lehnhoff came perilously close to it in his Glyndebourne Tristan und Isolde but offered a coherent vision. Daniel Kramer, now ENO's Artistic Director, has a few "bad Star Trek episodes" and many good ideas that don't always join up or else outstay their welcome. Unevennness abounds: hideous costumes and makeup clash with Anish Kapoor's eventually brilliant designs, singing and conducting are only patchily inspired.Let's celebrate the best first. Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Wagner was never satisfied with Tannhäuser, and it’s not hard to see why. Essentially a study of the tension between sensual and spiritual love, it was composed at a time when, by his own later confession, he lacked the resources to deal properly (that is, improperly) with the sensual element, and even in any profundity – one might feel – with the spiritual. The piece went through numerous revisions, extensions, compressions, tinkerings of one sort or another. But what was left is a patchwork of early and late, conventional and inspired, and a sometimes painfully naïve morality which tends to Read more ...
graham.rickson
Opera North’s ongoing Ring isn’t taking up much of the chorus’s time, which presumably is one of the reasons that many of its members have decamped half a mile east to collaborate with the West Yorkshire Playhouse in an eye-popping new staging of Sondheim’s Into The Woods. That opera companies can and should stage Sondheim is vindicated by this production: the musical values are superb, my only niggle being that James Holmes’s excellent pit players are hidden offstage. The tricksy ensemble numbers are dazzling, with every word and melodic line thrillingly clear.James Brining sets the opening Read more ...
David Nice
"Better than Puccini," raved one Tweeter after the final rehearsal of Opera Holland Park's season-opener. Nonsense: "nearly as good as Puccini" is the best any of his Italian contemporaries could hope for; that applies to Leoncavallo and the Cilea of Adriana Lecouvreur. Mascagni is more arthritic in his sense of movement – think of how long the plot of Cavalleria Rusticana takes to get going – and sometimes strives hard for those orchestral effects which seem so natural in Puccini. But Iris is at least half-interesting, unlike an OHP stinker, Zandonai's Francesca da Rimini, and it's Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment is 30 years old, and last night it celebrated in style. The orchestra has a long association with the music of Weber, who became iconic of their pioneering work in presenting 19th-century repertoire on period instruments. His greatest work received an impressive performance last night, one that demonstrated the many virtues of their unique approach to the work of the Romantics. But it wasn’t all a success, and was let down by a surprisingly modest staging concept from the usually ambitious David Pountney.The music of the opera is framed by Pountney in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Though composed after and based on a play by the same author, Puccini’s spaghetti western is in no way a sequel to Madama Butterfly, his whisky-sour eastern. Fanciulla is Butterfly’s opposite in almost every respect, and to tell the truth it isn’t much at home in a small theatre like the one at Grange Park. Where Butterfly is delicate and light-handed, its successor is loud and punch-drunk. Its heroine is no frail Puccini victim but a tough mother figure surprised by true love. Simpering geishas are replaced by rough gold-diggers, and mawkish tragedy by the Read more ...