Opera Reviews
The Dead City, English National Opera review - strong dream world, weak love storyMonday, 27 March 2023
Is Korngold a second-rank composer with some first-rate ideas? Most performances of the 23-year-old Viennese prodigy's Die tote Stadt make it seem so. Nearly smothered in glitter and craft, the story can compel – an oblique, promising stance on Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-morte, about an obsessive widower who thinks he sees his dead wife in a vivacious dancer. Does Annilese Miskimmon, ENO's semi-visible Artistic Director, carry it off? Read more... |
Turandot, Royal Opera review - spectacle and sound wow in this significant revivalTuesday, 21 March 2023
Nearly 40 years old, Andrei Serban’s Royal Opera Turandot feels like a gilded relic (I felt like a relic myself on learning that my writer neighbour wasn’t born when I saw Gwyneth Jones as the ice princess in 1984). Yet so too, outwardly, did Puccini’s only really grand opera when it premiered in the 1920s, exoticism being mostly confined to operettas and musicals. What keeps it modern is the score, which made it vital to hear what Antonio Pappano had to say with it. Read more... |
La bella dormente nel bosco/L'enfant et les sortilèges, Royal College of Music review - pure theatrical magicWednesday, 15 March 2023
Childhood fantasies and adult fears – sometimes it’s a fine line between the two. And it’s one that director Liam Steel walks with unerring precision in his ravishing new double-bill for the Royal College of Music: an overflowing toybox of invention and imagination that conceals, right at the bottom, something rather nasty and very real indeed. Read more... |
Blaze of Glory!, Welsh National Opera review - sparkling entertainment up the valleysMonday, 13 March 2023
Like certain other opera companies, WNO has leant in recent years towards popular shows of one kind or another. In their case this is not mere pandering to the Valleys coach parties, but a genuine attempt to assert an identity through an exploration of local south Welsh history. Read more... |
Der Rosenkavalier, Irish National Opera review - world-class delightMonday, 06 March 2023
Silver rose, golden voices. Richard Strauss calls for four of the best: two sopranos and a mezzo for the love-triangle that develops between a 17-year-old Count, his 32-year-old lover and the girl he falls for at first sight; a bass as one of opera’s strongest if queasiest comic creations, Baron Ochs, Viennese Falstaff, debaucher of maidservants and country girls. Read more... |
The Magic Flute, Welsh National Opera review - Mozart remodelled and remuddledMonday, 06 March 2023
So why not rewrite The Magic Flute with a new text and a heavily reconstructed plot? Read more... |
In The Realms of Sorrow, London Handel Festival, Stone Nest review - disappointed love has all the best tunesSaturday, 04 March 2023
Raw, muscular, visceral, haunting – this was Handel as you’ve never experienced him before. In this striking entry for the London Handel Festival, an uncompromising production by Adele Thomas with conductor Laurence Cummings took four of the composer’s early cantatas about thwarted love and mined them for all their incandescent rage and poisoned wistfulness. Read more... |
Giulio Cesare, English Touring Opera review - a return visit to Handel's EgyptMonday, 27 February 2023
English Touring Opera opened its spring season with Handel's Giulio Cesare – not a new production, but in a new guise. Typically for Baroque opera, the version of the work premiered in 1724 was very long. ETO previously took up the challenge by staging it in full over two nights. They then cut it down to a more manageable three hours (including interval), but that tour was interrupted by Covid, so now it's back for a full run. Read more... |
Rusalka, Royal Opera review - ravishing sounds, torpid stagingWednesday, 22 February 2023
Psychological depths in the myth of the water nymph who yearns for the human world, with disastrous results, have led to some unusual settings for Dvořák’s operatic masterpiece on the theme: a nursery, a hotel room (both successful), a brothel (not so much). What, though, when a production returns to the fairy-tale, developing at the same time the ecological devastation implied in the opera? Read more... |
The Rhinegold, English National Opera review - tacky, edgy, brilliantMonday, 20 February 2023
All that glitters, titular treasure included, is dangerous childsplay in Richard Jones’s third UK staging of what Wagner called the “preliminary evening” to the three main operas of The Ring of the Nibelung. It’s nothing like the previous two, for the Royal and Scottish Operas, in some ways disconcertingly minimal and occasionally ugly to look at. Yet everything adds up and unlike the cast for his Valkyrie, this team has the perfect mix of vocal and acting gold. Read more... |
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