sat 25/01/2025

Opera Reviews

Love Life, Opera North review - Lerner and Weill's blast into the past

Robert Beale

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. But in Love Life, Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s musical from 1948, it’s all the same country. The couple whose marriage is at the centre of it all are seen in different eras of US history, and while they hardly age, the country changes vastly.

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Jenůfa, Royal Opera review - electrifying details undermined by dead space

David Nice

This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won him the role of Antonio Pappano’s successor as Music Director, which he takes up at the beginning in the 2025/6 season.

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Best of 2024: Opera

David Nice

Ireland takes the palm for best of 2024, with Wexford hitting comic heights among its three rarities in Donizettian let’s-make-an-opera, while Irish National Opera gave us a world-class Salome, a Vivaldi rarity strongly cast, a Rigoletto featuring my favourite performance from a Manchester-born Irish-Iranian soprano, and the perfect solution to Berlioz’s half-Shakespearean Béatrice et Bénédict, thanks to Fiona Shaw and three more sensational Irish women.

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La rondine, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - sumptuous orchestral playing in an underrated score

alexandra Coghlan

There are no battlement leaps or murderous vows, no pistols or daggers, not so much as a slight cough disturbs the serene plot of La rondine – the Puccini opera once labelled a “poor man’s Traviata”.

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L’étoile, RNCM, Manchester review - lavish and cheerful absurdity

Robert Beale

Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’étoile is not exactly a French farce, but it comes from a post-Offenbach era (1877 saw its premiere) when cheerful absurdity was certainly expected, especially at Offenbach’s old theatre, the Bouffes Parisiens.

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The Pirates of Penzance, English National Opera review - fresh energy in clear-sighted G&S

David Nice

“Comedy is a serious thing,” quoth David Garrick. Gilbert and Sullivan knew it, and so does Mike Leigh, having bequeathed to ENO a clear and unfussy Pirates of Penzance. It does renewed honour to Victorian genius in Sarah Tipple’s freshly-cast revival. Most striking of all, perhaps, is how seriously conductor Natalie Murray Beale takes each musically rich number, vindicating Sullivan’s reputation as more than just a tunesmith to match Gilbert’s endlessly sharp and funny words.

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Rigoletto, Irish National Opera / Murrihy, Collins, NCH Dublin review - greatness everywhere

David Nice

How many Rigolettos have regular operagoers among you sat through where there wasn’t some major defect, in either the production or the three major roles? Here, there is none. INO’s jester and Duke are well cast, its Gilda supernaturally perfect in music and acting, while Julien Chavaz’s production, despite a few passing irritations, adds up to a coherent and disciplined whole. INO Artistic Director Fergus Sheil keeps Verdi's vivid music theatre on the move.

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The Elixir of Love, English National Opera review - a tale of two halves

David Nice

Sparkling Italian comic opera might have been just the tonic at this time. Trouble is, the bar was set so high recently by Wexford Festival Opera’s Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali, aka Viva la Mamma, that this better known, less malleable if more romantic Donizetti comedy came across as flat, one-dimensional and not very funny (I laughed out loud once; maybe I need to get out less). Which is a shame, because the singers deserved better.

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The Sound Voice Project, Linbury Theatre review - an art installation that has strayed into an opera house

alexandra Coghlan

What does it mean to have a voice? And what does it mean to lose it? Those are the questions the award-winning Sound Voice Project has explored – through research, collaboration and live performance – since its beginnings in 2016. The latest incarnation of composer Hannah Conway’s project is as “immersive digital opera performance installation”.

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The Tales of Hoffmann, Royal Opera review - three-headed monster feels baggier than ever

David Nice

Having all but sunk one seemingly unassailable opéra comique, Bizet’s Carmen, director Damiano Michieletto goes some way to helping out another with so many problems. Not far enough, alas, but the chosen edition, with its reams of recitative (mostly not by Offenbach), doesn’t help. Nor does the theme of women as either dolls, angels or devils. The real Hoffmann did it all so much better.

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