Opera Reviews
The Turn of the Screw, Garsington Opera review - superb music drama on an open stageFriday, 05 July 2019
The famous ambiguity of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is whether the ghosts that take possession of the two children are real or merely figments of the young Governess’s imagination. Britten’s opera resolves this unequivocally in favour of their reality: they appear alone together, and generally materialise so solidly that it never occurs to you to doubt their real existence. Read more...
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Noye's Fludde, ENO/Theatre Royal Stratford East review - two-dimensional music theatreThursday, 04 July 2019
Benjamin Britten's musical mystery tour is still bringing young communities together to work with professionals at the highest level 61 years on from its premiere in a Suffolk church, and Lyndsey Turner's sweet production at Stratford must have been as much fun to be in as any. Read more... |
Rusalka, Glyndebourne Festival review - away with the distressed fairiesMonday, 01 July 2019
When you think of the extravagant, violent, super grown-up subject-matter that stalked the operatic stage round about 1900 - the Toscas and the Salomes, the Cavs, the Pags and the rest of the verismo pack - you might find it strange to contemplate the ageing Dvořák still messing around with fairies at the bottom of his woodland pool, a subject that surely went out with the early Romantics. Read more... |
Trouble in Tahiti/A Dinner Engagement, Royal College of Music review - slick, witty and warmSaturday, 29 June 2019
It’s a clever decision to pair Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement with Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. The first is all about happily-ever-after, while the second is all about what happens next. The optimistic grime and smog of 1950s London gives way to the shrink-wrapped brightness and professional happiness of the suburban American dream, smiles freeze into toothpaste-commercial grins and love curdles into quiet domestic despair. Read more... |
The Cunning Little Vixen, Rattle, LSO, Barbican review – dark magic in the woodsFriday, 28 June 2019
As midsummer night’s dreams go, it would be hard to surpass the darkly enchanting collaboration between Sir Simon Rattle and Peter Sellars that will bring The Cunning Little Vixen to the Barbican again this evening and on Saturday. Janáček’s spellbinding vision of humans and animals caught up in the inexorable cycles of nature and time has its rough and scary side, of course. Read more... |
BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2019 Final, BBC Four review - stage confidence, supportive set-upMonday, 24 June 2019
If ever there was an instance of the great being the enemy of the good, it happened after all the live singing on Saturday night. This year we all remember, with sadness for his early death and amazement at his burning, burnished talent, the Siberian baritone Dmitry Hvorostovsky (1962-2017), winner in 1989. Read more... |
Brundibár, Welsh National Opera review - bittersweet children's opera from the ghettoMonday, 24 June 2019
Politics, in case you may not have noticed, has been in the air of late: questions of escape, release, borders, refugees, things like that. So WNO’s June season of operas about freedom has been suspiciously well timed. Read more... |
Belshazzar, The Grange Festival review – songs of freedomMonday, 24 June 2019
Cut almost anywhere into the lesser-known seams of Handel’s oratorios and you may strike plentiful nuggets of the purest gold. It may not be quite the case that Handel's Belshazzar, its score studded with nearly-forgotten musical treasures, has entirely disappeared from view. Read more... |
Anna Bolena, Longborough Festival Opera review - Henry VIII's court becomes a sexualised death cultMonday, 24 June 2019
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Anne Boleyn is number two on the list, so anyone who can remember even that much Tudor history can guess that Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is not going to end well. Read more... |
Boris Godunov, Royal Opera review - cool and surgical, with periodic chillsThursday, 20 June 2019
Suppose you're seeing Musorgsky's selective historical opera for the first time in Richard Jones's production, without any prior knowledge of the action. That child's spinning-top on the dropcloth: why? Then the curtain rises and we see Bryn Terfel's troubled Boris Godunov seated in near-darkness, while a figure with an outsized head plays with a real top in the upper room before being swiftly despatched by three assassins. Read more... |
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