Opera
David Nice
Operatic hit parades have always been subject to fashion. For people of my parents’ generation, the famous number from Delibes’s Lakmé was the heroine’s coloratura Bell Song, immortalised at the movies by Lily Pons and Kathryn Grayson. Now it’s the Flower Duet, courtesy of British Airways. But there are other numbers equally worthy of attention in a glorious score stockpiled with the kind of thing the French call la mélodie eternelle. This is an opera that outside France has been in need of singers and a not too violent concept to do it justice.At Holland Park second time around – the company Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with creepy glissandi emanating from the pit like nocturnal spirits. There is no mention in the score – this is an educated guess – for the chirrup of swifts and the hoot of wood pigeons, but this avian chorus joined the overture anyway at last week’s dress rehearsal in the open-air courtyard of Théâtre de l'Archevêché. Perhaps director Robert Carsen ordered them in as an atmospheric extra. An Aixtra, if you will.Carsen’s Dream has returned to Aix-en-Provence, at the Festival d'Art Lyrique where it began all the way back in 1991. Remarkably given its Read more ...
stephen.walsh
The gable end of Martin Graham’s converted barn opera-house at Longborough is surmounted by statues of three composers: pride of place, not surprisingly, to Wagner – the festival’s raison d’être – and with Verdi and Mozart on either side. It’s true one approaches Italian opera here with somewhat less confidence than Wagner. But it’s refreshing to have it at all, and the new Rigoletto, though patchy, has enough good points to make it worth the visit, if not the detour.Caroline Clegg’s production, it’s true, struggles to achieve the pace and tension that can always give Verdi the Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a brilliantly sunny January afternoon amidst a general drama of rain at an industrial park outside Aix-en-Provence, and members of a production team are gathering for the first time in the back yard of the festival’s rehearsal studios. Some have met earlier, and three of the five singers who’ll be arriving shortly know each other thanks to the connections already made through the European Network of Opera Academies. But it’s a journey into the unknown with ENOA’s fifth anniversary co-production, which will only reach its proper beginning in tonight’s Aix premiere, and hopefully develop Read more ...
David Nice
It may only be a revival, but this is what the Royal Opera does best, above all in fielding a living legend of a Falstaff for Verdi's last masterpiece who’d probably be beyond the pockets of many other houses. Italian baritone, masterchef and filmstar Ambrogio Maestri is flanked by a good ensemble including two of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme’s finest graduates, with top orchestral standards for Verdi's most elaborate score under the perfectly-pacing Danish conductor Michael Schønwandt, and a staging high on style, culminating in a dazzler of a final scene which is a return to Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Britten’s first chamber opera is very much a Glyndebourne piece; its world premiere in the old festival theatre in July 1946 was also the festival’s inaugural post-war production. It brought into being the English Opera Group, and led soon afterwards to the foundation of the Aldeburgh Festival. So it’s good, in principle at least, to have it back on the main stage here, after an initial airing on tour in 2013. I say in principle, because in practice the work and its staging present so many problems that I can’t ever recall seeing a production without wincing with irritation. And this Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Some of the best nights of opera to be had in London come courtesy of students. It’s not something we talk enough about, possibly because, with four major music colleges in the city, the quality is so high that the performers can (and are) judged as professionals. The Royal College of Music’s Albert Herring is up there with the best of them – an ensemble show bursting with character, detail, wit and an abundance of joy.Britten’s comic opera is blessed with one of the finest and funniest librettos – spoken character sketches as deft as the composer’s own musical caricatures. The combination is Read more ...
David Nice
There are two operatic types who should leave Rossini’s epic swansong for the stage well alone. One would usually be a conductor who ignores many of the notes written by a master at the height of his powers, since even the least dramatic numbers have musical idiosyncrasy in them. Antonio Pappano still omits, among other things, Rossini’s superb Mozartian canon-trio for women's voices and wind ensemble; but what he does conduct is so focused and shapely that he must be forgiven. Not so his director, Damiano Michieletto, who not only jettisons a choreographer for the essential swathes of ballet Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
Antonio Pappano, artistic director and chief conductor of the Royal Opera House, is a polymath, for he is also a brilliant and persuasive narrator of the history of music. Here he embarked on a four part history of the operatic voice, starting at the very top – or how to reach those high Cs, the Everest for the soprano.Often speaking beside a grand piano, on the grand and empty stage of the ROH, and thus subliminally reminding us that he first worked as a repetiteur before becoming one of the world’s leading conductors, he creatively interweaved vintage film of legendary Read more ...
graham.rickson
We’ve been spoilt over the past few summers in Leeds; Opera North’s semi-staged Ring has been a triumph, and the whole cycle will be performed complete in June 2016. To fill the Town Hall in 2015 we’ve got concert performances of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. You have to commend the decision taken to play the work straight through without any intermissions, though it’s a bit of a slog in places; much of Act 2 feels dramatically inert. By contrast, Götterdämmerung’s five hours pass in the blink of an eye.You marvel at how much Wagner’s style was to develop in just a few decades; in a work like Read more ...
David Nice
Lagoon, miasma and scirocco may seem as far away as you can get from the rolling hills and pleasant airs of the Wormsley Estate in deepest home counties territory. Nor are the bleached bones of Britten’s bleak if ultimately transformative operatic swansong the usual culinary fare many punters might have expected to go with their fine wines and gourmet picnics. Against the odds director Paul Curran makes it all work, going about as deep, disturbing and ambiguous as the work allows while still serving a star performance in Paul Nilon’s Aschenbach and adding to the opera-ballet dimension that Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Verdi's La Traviata has become one of the best-loved and most-performed works in the operatic repertoire, but this is no thanks to sections of the English press. In this entertaining romp through the opera's history, presenters Tom Service and Amanda Vickery drooled over the juiciest bits from some of the reviews from La Traviata's London debut in 1856 – for instance The Times of London deplored "an exhibition of harlotry upon the public stage", adding that this was "the poetry of the brothel" – before splitting up to examine the musical and historical background of the piece.Once you'd got Read more ...