Opera
Matthew Wright
Usually, anyone bringing tuberculosis and transgression to the regional centres of Woking, Norwich and Milton Keynes would meet redoubtable opposition. In the case of Glyndebourne’s new touring production of La traviata, that would be a shame, because this is a lean, powerful version that reaches straight for the heart and gives it a good squeeze. In Russian soprano Irina Dubrovskaya and American tenor Zach Borichevsky, Glyndebourne has found very convincing replacements for the acclaimed Festival performers Venera Gimadieva and Michael Fabiano, who enact director Tom Cairns’ vision of Read more ...
graham.rickson
Tim Albery’s production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea takes plenty of liberties. There are moments when you scratch your head, quietly sigh, and think about your interval drink, or what you’ll eat when you get home.The cuts may disorientate Monteverdi affecionados. There’s also a bit of reordering, and no proper coronation. Albery’s new translation contains some excruciating couplets: Poppea is rhymed with "betray her" at one point, and later on there’s the pairing of strumpet and crumpet. Cupid is matched with stupid. Niggles aside, this is a wonderfully fresh, accessible staging Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea is an opera with a one-track mind. The music throbs and pulses with dancing desire, suspensions and elaborate embellishments defer gratification, while recitative is poised constantly on the edge of melodic climax. Desire is everywhere, from the innocent flirtations of a young courtier and his lady, to the hopeless love of Ottone and of course the knowing, mature passions of the Emperor Nerone and his mistress Poppea. Without it, there’s a void at the core of the opera – a void no amount of fine singing or playing can fill.And try the Academy of Ancient Read more ...
stephen.walsh
So easily parcelled up as a master of opera buffa, Rossini is a composer who constantly surprises by the emotional and intellectual range of his best work. William Tell, which opened WNO’s current season three weeks ago, is a major progenitor of Verdi, even arguably Wagner: grand opera devoid of what Wagner himself called effects without causes. Now the company has added the much earlier Moses in Egypt, very much not buffa, but not strictly grand either, more like oratorio by a composer whose theatrical instincts were so strong that everything he wrote ended up as opera.This is of course an Read more ...
David Nice
So now it’s Minnie Get Your Gun from the director who brought us the gobsmackingly inventive Young Vic Annie (as in sharpshooter Oakley, not Little Orphan). Richard Jones’s subversive but still very human take on Irving Berlin discombobulated its American support and never made Broadway; but there’s little here that would rock the steadily progressive Met (home of La fanciulla del West’s 1910 premiere, with Enrico Caruso as “Dick Johnson” aka quickly repentant bandit Ramerrez). Girl should certainly go well in Santa Fe, sharing this production with ENO.Jones knows better in his maturity than Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
2014 is the 250th anniversary of the death of Jean-Philippe Rameau, France’s baroque giant and maverick. To say that the UK celebrations have been muted is to put in generously, reconfirming a national trend that has long sidelined this repertoire in favour of more familiar Italian and German contemporaries. So it was especially good to see the Wigmore Hall full for an anniversary concert from instrumental ensemble Les Paladins and soprano Sandrine Piau.But, emerging back out onto Wigmore Street after barely more than an hour of performance, I found myself baffled. Was this brief evening of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
French soprano Sandrine Piau, born in 1965 in a south-western suburb of Paris, has an agile, supple voice. It soars, so critics reach readily for all those bird metaphors: nightingale, sparrow, "she leaves the earth on wings of song" and so on. She has worked regularly with more or less the entire pantheon of baroque and early music specialists: William Christie, René Jacobs, Philippe Herreweghe, Christophe Rousset, Emmanuelle Haïm, Sigiswald Kuijken, Gustav Leonhardt, Ivor Bolton, Ton Koopman, Marc Minkowski and Nikolaus Harnoncourt.Away from Baroque repertoire, Piau sings Mozart - a Read more ...
theartsdesk
He was not only a bracing conductor/harpsichordist pioneer in period-instrument authenticity, writes David Nice, but also a gentleman and a scholar. My only direct acquaintance with Christopher Hogwood, who died earlier this week at the age of 73, was in two projects dear to his heart: the recording of Handel’s Orlando, mentioned by its countertenor star James Bowman below as a highlight of his career, and his phenomenally well researched Haydn symphonies series, both for that handsomely logo-ed early music branch of Decca known as L’Oiseau-Lyre.Hogwood was very much a part of my own Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
At the end of last night’s giddy, triumphant concert at the Barbican, Joyce DiDonato was presented with a bouquet by a member of the audience. It included, among more conventional flowers, a tomato plant, complete with ripe tomato. That says it all really. Just imagine Netrebko, Gheorghiu or even Bartoli faced with a tomato and the confusion that would ensue. DiDonato simply gave it a starring role in her speech to the audience, and when the tomato fell to the floor during the athletic closing vibrato of “Tanti affetti”, casually bent to pick it up before tossing it into the air – all the Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s only a few days since I was remarking, à propos the WNO revival, that Carmen usually survives its interpreters. Now WNO’s humble neighbour, Mid Wales Opera, are proving the same point, but in a more positive spirit, by touring a new production by Jonathan Miller, with a vastly reduced orchestra, a cast of fourteen including chorus, and a set (Nicky Shaw) made up of moveable stagings cleverly lit (by Declan Randall), like some highly simplified Chirico. Once again, Bizet comes through, not exactly enhanced, not always idiomatic, but as enjoyable as ever.The unexpected heroes of the show, Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The Russian conductor Vladimir Jurowski, chief conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, heads its major new series devoted to the music of Sergei Rachmaninov, in context with his forerunners and successors. This is to be the largest celebration of Rachmaninov ever undertaken in a single season, with 11 concerts to include all the composer’s key works for orchestra, including some in rarely heard early versions, placed in context with music by his inspirations, contemporaries and successors including Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Szymanowski, Scriabin and Vaughan Williams.Here Jurowski tells Read more ...
graham.rickson
You’d expect a regional opera company to focus on the core repertoire in these economically challenging times. Happily, Opera North’s La traviata is a new staging and not a weary revival. Alessandro Talvi’s production doesn’t take many risks and shouldn’t offend anyone, but the whole is beautifully designed, well-acted and handsomely sung.The one surprise comes as Verdi’s hesitant, restrained Prelude steals in, and we think we see Hye-Youn Lee’s Violetta gazing at a full moon. It's actually a wonderfully creepy projection made by video designer Gemma Burditt. It's as if we're staring down the Read more ...