Opera Reviews
Best of 2015: OperaWednesday, 30 December 2015
How ironic that English National Opera turned out possibly the two best productions of the year after the Arts Council had done its grant-cutting worst, punishing the company simply, it seemed, for not being the irrationally preferred Royal Opera. Read more...
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Eugene Onegin, Royal OperaSunday, 20 December 2015
Searing emotional truth has to be at the core of any attempt to stage Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes after Pushkin”. I was among the minority who thought Kasper Holten got it right, with deep knowledge of the original verse-novel, in his first production as Covent Garden’s Director of Opera back in February 2013. Read more... |
A Christmas Carol, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 19 December 2015
Dickens’s public readings from his novels were almost as famous and popular as the novels themselves. He would write special scripts that gave prominence to particular characters and that dramatized the salient events of each story; and of all these performances, A Christmas Carol was one of the favourites, his and his audiences’. Read more... |
Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci, Royal OperaFriday, 04 December 2015
You can forgive a certain amount of scepticism. After his now-infamous Royal Opera debut earlier this year, directing a Guillaume Tell that was heavy on concept and light on just about everything else, Damiano Michieletto returns for a Cavalleria Rusticana/Pagliacci that sounded as though it might go the same way. Read more... |
Zazà, BBCSO, Benini, BarbicanSunday, 29 November 2015
Send in the clowns, as they sing in this palace-of-varieties first act, not for Pagliacci, Leoncavallo’s sole foothold on today’s operatic repertoire, but for the fool-for-love heroine of a sparkling, swooning rarity. Musically, Zazà is a notch above Mascagni and Giordano for orchestral delights, just below supreme genius Puccini, but its admittedly thinly-spread plot ends by being rather remarkable. Read more... |
Castor et Pollux, St John's Smith SquareSaturday, 21 November 2015
An evening of Rameau was never going to be a neutral event. Last Friday all things French became painfully, irretrievably politicised, and while there were no speeches or acknowledgements last night, when Christian Curnyn dispatched the opera’s final ensemble not in fanfares and crescendos but the slyest of diminuendos, it was the perfect response –a Gallic shrug of a gesture, defiant in its charm and wit. Read more... |
Morgen und Abend, Royal OperaSaturday, 14 November 2015
It’s never funny like Ligeti’s Le grand macabre, though it touches on that joke apocalypse’s more nebulous soundscapes. Nor is it obviously dynamic like David Sawer’s From Morning to Midnight, with which its title is not to be confused (there are no transitional stages here, only birth and death). Wagner’s cosmic sweeps don't entangle the banal with the numinous like this. So what exactly is the new opera Morning and Evening? Read more... |
L'Ospedale, Wilton's Music HallFriday, 13 November 2015
Anyone lamenting the current trend for “wellness” and other associated holistic, pseudo-medical fads might want to take themselves for a medicinal trip down to Wilton’s Music Hall for L’Ospedale. There you will discover (best keep the homeopathic drops handy) that 17th-century satirists were there long before fancy Surrey clinics got in on the action. Read more... |
Tamerlano, Il Pomo d'Oro, Emelyanychev, BarbicanWednesday, 11 November 2015
The curse of Tamerlano strikes again. The last time London saw Handel’s darkest and most sober opera was in 2010. Graham Vick’s production for the Royal Opera House lost its unlikely star Placido Domingo before it even opened in London, ran interminably long and lost any emotional impetus somewhere in the course of its three-and-a-half hours. Read more... |
The Force of Destiny, English National OperaTuesday, 10 November 2015
Verdi’s dark tale gets even darker in this new staging from Calixto Bieito. He updates the story to the Spanish Civil War, a setting with plenty of opportunity for his trademark violence but also offering illuminating parallels on the story itself. ENO has assembled a fine cast for the occasion, and the musical direction, from Mark Wigglesworth, is dynamic and dramatically engaged. Read more... |
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