sun 10/12/2023

Opera Reviews

Rodelinda, The English Concert, Bicket, Saffron Hall review - perfect team helps us stay the long Handel course

David Nice

If ever a marriage was made in heaven, it would have to be the one between Lucy Crowe’s beleaguered Queen Rodelinda and Iestyn Davies’ King Bertarido, the husband she believes dead and almost loses a second time. The duet at the end of Handel’s gem-packed Act Two where they’re reunited and then separated again was peerlessly moving as they performed it last night in Saffron Hall with the vibrant English Concert under Harry Bicket (more about the circumstances later).

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Gazzaniga's Don Giovanni, Royal College of Music review - a modest one-acter overloaded

David Nice

Fascinating for the history of opera, less so for opera. The most interesting thing about Gazzaniga’s take on the libertine and the stone guest, apart from a couple of sprightly numbers, is the libretto by Bertati, repurposed with better dramatic shape by Da Ponte for Mozart, whose masterpiece opened in Prague eight months after the lesser work’s Venice premiere of February 1787. We have a right, though, to witness Gazzaniga’s unadulterated original. This wasn’t it.

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Jephtha, Royal Opera review - uncomfortable sacrifice oratorio not seismic enough

David Nice

“Tell me,” The West Wing’s President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) asks of a right-wing TV host who uses the Bible to call homosexuality an abomination, “I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21.7… What would a good price for her be?” He might also have cited Judges 11 and asked about sacrificing his daughter as thanks for victory over his enemies, the position of Israelite Jephtha having massacred the Ammonites.

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Un ballo in maschera, Chelsea Opera Group, Cadogan Hall review - Italianate vitality, if not much finesse

David Nice

Eighteenth century Sweden is the nominal setting for A Masked Ball, but its essence is a unique mixture of Italian testosterone and French opéra-comique elegance. If this concert performance brought it closer to the indiscriminate vitality of early Verdi rather than the experimental shades of the middle period, there was still a huge amount to enjoy, and one stellar performance.

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La Rondine, Opera North review - rehabilitation for a Puccini damp squib?

Robert Beale

The signal achievement of this production of La Rondine may be that James Hurley (director) and Kerem Hasan (conductor) have rehabilitated it to its proper place, against the perception that it’s the least successful of Puccini’s mature operas.

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Masque of Might, Opera North review - a tale of ecological virtue

Robert Beale

Sir David Pountney’s creation of a “masque” performance for our times, recycling music Purcell wrote for his, is downright good entertainment even if the plotline’s a bit incoherent.

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Iolanthe, English National Opera review - still gorgeous but ever so slightly less funny than before

David Nice

Parliament may be topsy-turvy, with a motley bunch of Lords the only hope in vetoing outrageous bills, but up the road at the London Coliseum a more disciplined company is steering a luxury liner with perfect craft. Cal McCrystal’s best G&S so far, where fairies meet peers with, as the cliché has it, hilarious results, was a winner first time round, with gorgeous designs by Paul Brown taking fairyland, Arcadia and Westminster seriously. 

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Faust, Irish National Opera review - world-class singing turns the musical-dramatic screw

David Nice

Is Gounod’s Faust really a “complex and multi-layered work”, as director Jack Furness claims? Goethe’s original and Berlioz’s Damnation, absolutely; this tuneful concoction, half light opera, half kitsch melodrama, not so much. If Furness’s take leads him to concept overload, as well as quite a few really strong ideas, the big strength here lies in the casting of three world-class singers in the eternal triangle of rake, seduceable innocent and devil.

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Falstaff, Opera North review - going green and having fun

Robert Beale

There’s a charmingly retro feel to Opera North’s new Falstaff, which comes from it being done as part of their new “green”, i.e. ecologically conscious, season.

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La Traviata, Welsh National Opera review - memorable revival, unforgettable lead

stephen Walsh

It’s always tempting, at curtain-up in La Traviata, to settle back, half-close one’s eyes, and soak up the familiar without the anxiety of the new. Not this time you won’t. David McVicar’s lavish 2009 text-true staging is being revived with a generally strong, stylish and dependable cast.

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