wed 28/05/2025

Opera Reviews

Hamlet, Glyndebourne review - integrity if not genius in Brett Dean's score

David Nice

Nature’s germens tumble all together rather readily in more recent operatic Shakespeare. Following the overblown storm before the storm of Reimann’s Lear and the premature angst of Ryan Wigglesworth’s The Winter’s Tale, what's rotten in the state of Denmark rushes to the surface a little too quickly in Brett Dean's bold new take on the most challenging of all the tragedies.

Read more...

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Snape Maltings

alexandra Coghlan

It’s all there in the first few bars of Britten’s music – that unsettling tension between beauty and familiarity, and eerie, undefinable otherness. Those cello glissandi might end in glowing major chords, but the tentacle-like slides throw them into doubt. We’re no longer in a binary world of major or minor, but a harmonic landscape of infinite possibility.

Read more...

Tristan und Isolde, Longborough Festival

stephen Walsh

The Longborough Festival was started, essentially, to perform Wagner, and Wagner is still what it does best. This revival of Carmen Jakobi’s production of Tristan und Isolde is the strongest argument imaginable for small-theatre Wagner.

Read more...

Radamisto, Guildhall School, Milton Court

alexandra Coghlan

''…after various Accidents, it comes to pass that he recovers both Her and his Kingdom”.

Read more...

La Rondine, Opera Holland Park

David Nice

When are the big international opera houses going to wake up to the great British talent that is Elizabeth Llewellyn? With her opulent soprano – shaded middle register, full bloom at the top, cutting chest voice – she was born to sing Verdi and Puccini, and her stage presence is undeniable from the moment she steps out.

Read more...

L'Orfeo, EBS, Gardiner, Colston Hall, Bristol

stephen Walsh

This last of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s semi-staged Monteverdi series took us back practically to the very start of the whole genre. L’Orfeo was presented in Mantua in 1607 as a court opera, and will have been seen and heard by a fraction of the number of people who crowded into Bristol’s Colston Hall on...

Read more...

The Mikado review - Sasha Regan's all-male operetta formula hits a reef

David Nice

Men playing boys playing girls, women and men, all female parts convincingly falsettoed and high musical standards as backbone: Sasha Regan's single-sex Gilbert and Sullivan has worked a special magic on Iolanthe and The Pirates of Penzance, HMS Pinafore and now The Mikado, not so much. Energetic song and dance are still in evidence.

Read more...

Sebestyén, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, RFH

Sebastian Scotney

This was a very fine concert indeed, plus a lot more. The first half was a very carefully planned series of unveilings around the theme of Béla Bartók and Hungarian folk music, the second an overwhelming performance of his Duke Bluebeard’s Castle.

Read more...

Hipermestra / La Traviata, Glyndebourne

Ismene Brown

 A Saudi princess in her white wedding dress digs her own grave as men pile up stones to hurl at her head — next, an Isis fighter is stabbing a knife at her neck to decapitate her. Ah, the fate of the heroine of the average baroque opera about the appalling ways of men and gods.

Read more...

Y Tŵr, MTW, Sherman Theatre, Cardiff

stephen Walsh

Until yesterday my only experience of the Welsh language in the opera house was a few isolated passages in Iain Bell’s In Parenthesis last year and the surtitles WNO routinely put up alongside the English in the Millennium Centre.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

Help to give theartsdesk a future!

It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.

It followed some...

The Frogs, Southwark Playhouse review - great songs save upd...

As a regular theatregoer, you learn pretty quickly that there’s no story too bizarre to work as a...

Album: Sally Shapiro - Ready to Live a Lie

Ready to Live a Lie is so sonically vaporous it almost isn’t there. While the album’s 11 tracks draw from continental European musical...

Il Trittico, Opéra de Paris review - reordered Puccini works...

So here in Paris, as at Salzburg in 2022, it’s no longer “Puccini’s Trittico” but “the Asmik Grigorian Trittico”. Which would be...

When the Light Breaks review - only lovers left alive

Grief takes unexpected turns over the course of a long Icelandic...

Marwood, Crabb, Wigmore Hall review - tangos, laments and an...

James Crabb is a musical magician, taking the ever-unfashionable accordion into new and unlikely places, through bespoke arrangements of a...

Dennis, RSNO, Dunedin Consort, Søndergård, Usher Hall, Edinb...

"How long is Wagner’s Ring Cycle?" That’s not the opening to a joke, it’s a genuine question asked by a friend who I’d met up with before heading...

Dara Ó Briain, Soho Theatre Walthamstow review - master stor...

Dara Ó Briain’s  has described his previous show So… Where Were We? – in which he describes his search for his birth...