Opera Reviews
Out of Her Mouth, Dunedin Consort, Mahogany Opera, Hera, Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh review - she carried a watermelonTuesday, 27 June 2023
A joint venture between Dunedin Consort, Mahogany Opera and intersectional feminist opera company Hera, Out of Her Mouth is a semi-staged version of three short baroque cantatas. Written by French composer Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre, each is based on a different woman from the Old Testament. Read more... |
Candide, Welsh National Opera review - vaut le voyage, just for the visual sideMonday, 26 June 2023
If you read the synopsis of Candide - which I strongly advise if you plan a visit to this new WNO production - you may well wonder how it will be possible to get through so much in so short a time. Voltaire’s novella is itself fairly short, but opera takes more time and songs are songs, not action. Read more... |
Werther, Grange Park Opera review - Italian-American principal singers with strong chemistryMonday, 26 June 2023
Grange Park Opera has been setting a high standard in French opera ever since the company's first proper season in 1999. This Werther is the company's third by Jules Massenet. The first two were rarities, pioneering efforts: a fascinating tussle between lubriciousness and piety in Thais in 2006, and then a poignant and deeply felt portrayal of old age in a splendid Don Quichotte in 2014. Read more... |
Ariadne auf Naxos, Garsington Opera review - golden thread leads to deep emotionSunday, 25 June 2023
When tears well up during stretches of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s curious hybrid which you never expected to move you, something special's going on. The magic happened last night in an evening which I didn't anticipate equalling “the Carmelites experience” at Glyndebourne. But, in its very different way, it did, in terms of casting, conducting and a production (by Bruno Ravella) that wasn’t too interventionist but had some powerful ideas of its own. Read more... |
Everest, Barbican review - a powerful operatic debut from Joby TalbotSaturday, 24 June 2023
Schubert gave us a winter’s journey for the 19th century: a wandering lover brooding, remembering, fantasising, maybe even dying to the chilly accompanying churn of the hurdy-gurdy man. In Everest, composer Joby Talbot and librettist Gene Scheer recreate it for the 21st. Read more... |
Il trovatore, Royal Opera review - heaven and hellFriday, 23 June 2023
The trouble with Trovatore, Verdi’s sometimes barrel-organish, slightly middle-aged troubadour, isn’t so much the silly shocker of a plot, triggered by a gypsy so crazed with vengeance that she throws her own baby on a bonfire by mistake, as the choppy dramatic line, so hard to thread. Under the circumstance, Adele Thomas’s medieval-hell production could have been a lot worse, and the vocal quality is there throughout under Antonio Pappano’s watchful guidance. Read more... |
Werther, Royal Opera review - Kaufmann off form in this stiff revivalWednesday, 21 June 2023
Benoit Jacquot’s handsome period production of Werther has been quietly putting in the miles for the Royal Opera. Read more... |
L'elisir d'amore, Longborough Festival review - agreeable nonsense in a semi-modern English villageWednesday, 21 June 2023
Frederick Delius composed an opera called A Village Romeo and Juliet; Donizetti composed a sort of village Tristan and Isolde, but called it L’elisir d’amore – The Love Potion. The hero, Nemorino, inspired by the Tristan tale, buys an elixir off a passing quack, in the hope it will make the beautiful, capricious Adina fall for him. Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, Opera Holland Park review - the Great Grimm Bake-OffMonday, 12 June 2023
Like any decent cake (and we saw plenty on the Holland Park stage), a tasty production of Hansel and Gretel needs a careful balance of flavours. Sweet and sharp; light and dark; fantasy and realism; fright and delight. Directed by John Wilkie, Opera Holland Park’s version of Engelbert Humperdinck’s well-preserved “fairy-tale opera” from 1893 skilfully mixes its ingredients into a sort of Great Grimm Bake-Off. It hints at horrors but never really threatens to turn sour. Read more... |
Dialogues des Carmélites, Glyndebourne review - faith overwhelmed by horrorSunday, 11 June 2023
Harrowing and holiness alternate in Poulenc’s unique masterpiece, nominally an opera about nuns during the French revolution, at a deeper level a music-drama about the greatest disturbances in the human condition. Glyndebourne’s cast, conductor and orchestra handle the variety wth total mastery. If Barrie Kosky’s production lets horror overwhelm us, that’s justified too. If you’re not a heap at the end of it, that’s your problem. 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...
Music Reissues Weekly: Stefan Gnyś - Horizoning
For most of Canada’s listening public, their country-man Stefan Gnyś – pronounced G'neesh – wasn’t a concern. The 300 copies of his 1969 single...
Wicked review - overly busy if beautifully sung cliffhanger
"No one mourns the wicked," we're told during the immediately arresting beginning to Wicked, which concludes two hours 40 minutes later...
Akram Khan, GIGENIS, Sadler’s Wells review - now 50, Khan re...
London-born Akram Khan has come a long way in a 35-year career. He performed as a young teen in Peter Brook’s production of The ...
Snow Leopard review - clunky visual effects mar a director...
Pema Tseden's final film Snow Leopard is a Chinese Tibetan-language drama that addresses wild animal preservation. It serves as a kind of...
King James, Hampstead Theatre review - UK premiere drains a...
Cleveland is probably the American city most like the one in which I grew up. Early into the icy embrace of post-industrialisation, not...
Album: Kim Deal - Nobody Loves You More
The progress of Kim Deal has been one of the great delights of modern music. Much as one wishes Pixies well, they have never been the same without...
Kavakos, Philharmonia, Blomstedt, RFH review - a supreme val...
From a privileged position in the Festival Hall stalls, I could see 97-year old Herbert Blomstedt’s near-immobile back as he sat on a piano stool...
Hannah Scott, Worthing Pavilion Theatre Atrium review - fill...
London-based singer-songwriter Hannah Scott has warned her next song may reduce us to tears. It is, she says, inspired by events following the...