Opera Reviews
Best of 2020: OperaSunday, 27 December 2020
Surreal fantasy came off best this year, before and after the fall. Read more...
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Royal Opera Christmas Concert online review – pajama party around the Nutcracker treeThursday, 24 December 2020
So Hansel and Gretel can’t cuddle up together in the dark forest, Musetta doesn’t fall into long-suffering lover Marcello’s arms and there’s no audience to play to (as there would have been three days earlier). Read more... |
Pagliacci, Opera Ensemble, Longborough review - stripped down but liveMonday, 21 December 2020
List all the problems that the pandemic places in the way of operatic performance, and you might well end up wondering why anyone would bother. Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Scottish Opera online review - wit and deception in an empty theatreMonday, 14 December 2020
For its latest production, unveiled on Sunday evening but recorded in November, Scottish Opera toys playfully with the absurdities of Covid-compliant performance practice. But maybe sensing our weariness with the whole business, it is not overdone. Read more... |
L'enfant et les sortilèges, VOPERA, LPO, Reynolds online – Ravel and Colette reimaginedThursday, 26 November 2020
Colette’s sharply fantastical libretto for Ravel’s second one-act opera imagines wrongs exercised upon objects and animals by a naughty child revisited by the victims upon the perpetrator. Read more... |
The Seven Deadly Sins, Opera North online review - viscerally thrillingMonday, 23 November 2020
Theatres are currently banned from moving scenery and props about on stage and you might expect this to present a major obstacle to a production of The Seven Deadly Sins. How else is the opera’s protagonist to be seen to visit seven American cities, succumbing to a different sin in each? Read more... |
Ariodante, Royal Opera online review – stylish, but confinedMonday, 23 November 2020
“After black and gloomy night, the sun shines all the brighter,” sings hero Ariodante after a life-threatening bout of jealousy nearly scuppers a royal wedding. There’s a snag in Handel’s dramaturgy: all that sunshine in preparation for the nuptials in Act One isn’t really earned. Read more... |
Bluebeard's Castle, LSO, Rattle, LSO St Luke's online review - slow-burning magnificenceWednesday, 04 November 2020
Poulenc’s La voix humaine comes close, but Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle has to be the perfect lockdown opera, this heady tale of two mismatched souls stuck in a confined space (admittedly an enormous one) alarmingly pertinent. Read more... |
The Magic Flute, Glyndebourne review - deeply moving light in darknessMonday, 02 November 2020
How does Mozart do it? His music can provoke deep emotions even in the unlikeliest operatic situations, if well done, and present circumstances stirred them up all the more on Sunday afternoon. Read more... |
Meet the Young Artists Week recital, Linbury Theatre – four big personalitiesThursday, 29 October 2020
Throughout this most difficult of years, the Royal Opera has done the right thing for the singers on its Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. They were fortunate to finish the run of Handel’s Susanna before the Linbury Theatre closed down for over seven months (yesterday saw its reopening to a necessarily small audience). Read more... |
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