Opera Reviews
Don Giovanni/Sibelius plus, Swedish RSO, Harding, livestream review - dark studio ritualsThursday, 18 June 2020
"Touch her and you die," sings Masetto in telling Don Giovanni to keep away from his Zerlina. There's certainly trouble, though not instant death, when fingers briefly meet. Read more... |
Live from Covent Garden 1, Royal Opera and Ballet online review - small-scale but perfectly formedSunday, 14 June 2020
Vintage champagne was served up last night, and whether you found the glass half-full or half-empty would depend on your perspective. Read more... |
La voix humaine, Grange Park Opera online review – hanging on the telephoneFriday, 05 June 2020
Rustles of renewal are stirring in the Surrey woods where Grange Park Opera has built the splendid theatre that remains, for this summer, sadly out of bounds. Faced with the cancellation of its 2020 programme, Wasfi Kani’s company has not simply relied, like many others, on a back catalogue of archive videos to keep its audiences onside. Read more... |
The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, Dutch National Opera, OperaVision review - fairy-tale good and evil made realThursday, 21 May 2020
How do you render pure goodness interesting? Unorthodox director Dmitri Tcherniakov and radiant young soprano Svetlana Ignatovich make us smile and break our hearts with their take on the maiden Fevroniya: living at one with nature, seeing God in everything and destroyed by her encounter with civic life. Read more... |
Sadko, Bolshoi Opera online review - medieval Russia meets reality TVTuesday, 12 May 2020
Russia came late to the coronavirus lockdown, and will be leaving early – this evening Vladimir Putin announced that national measures were coming to an end, though the disease still rages there. Read more... |
Eugene Onegin, Komische Oper, OperaVision review - sensual and devastatingSaturday, 09 May 2020
Liberated from Pushkin’s salons, ballrooms and bedrooms, Barrie Kosky’s Eugene Onegin bursts out into nature. Tatyana and Olga lounge in the long grass stealing heavy fingerfuls of jam straight from the jar; party-guests run through the trees with flaming torches, dancing wildly, barefoot; after the harvest groups gather on the lawn with picnics and games. This is a world apart, the hot, hazy, endless summer of first love – an intense, but unreliable memory. Read more... |
Metropolitan Opera At-Home Gala livestream review - classy joy and sorrow in domestic settingsMonday, 27 April 2020
So many of the world's great opera singers inviting us to look through the keyhole at a carefully presented version of their lockdown lives over four very variable hours, such bad sound for the most part (Skype, like Zoom, catches the voice but loses the accompaniment). Read more... |
Elektra/Der Rosenkavalier, Nightly Met Opera Streams review - searing hits and indulgent missesWednesday, 22 April 2020
A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, Complicité online review - well-projected journey from pastoral to madhouseWednesday, 08 April 2020
One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration with W H Auden and Chester Kallman is as a numbers opera in nine pictures, four of them indebted to Hogarth's series of paintings/prints. Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Opera North, OperaVision review - claustrophobic visions of terror and beautyFriday, 03 April 2020
Feeling stir-crazy right now? Imagine being confined to one room with a half-crazed housekeeper, two dysfunctional kids and two increasingly insistent ghosts, plagued by nightmares, unable even to get out into the garden or walk down to the lake. Read more... |
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