mon 21/07/2025

Opera Reviews

Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Edward Seckerson

The Major-Domo promises fireworks during the Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma, the director of Glyndebourne’s new staging, drops a bombshell - actually several bombshells. Glyndebourne’s wartime history (as a refuge for evacuees) would seem to have chimed with the darker implications of the opera within - namely, the Composer’s opera seria of the title.

Read more...

La donna del lago, Royal Opera

David Benedict

I mean, really, what is the point of Rossini? That’s actually not as stupid as it sounds. No-one has ever mistaken any of his operas for taut music-drama, and even the best of them are peculiarly difficult to pull off because without first-rate singers, everything collapses. That is, without doubt, not a problem facing the Royal Opera’s new La donna del lago. Trust me: London hasn’t heard such spectacular Rossini singing in decades.

Read more...

Albert Herring, Opera North

graham Rickson

Staging Britten’s third opera in the round in a small performance space of the Howard Assembly Room makes complete sense. Albert Herring’s supporting cast of village grotesques are that little bit more oppressive when they’re singing yards away from your face. The effect is nicely claustrophobic too – after this, you somehow can’t imagine seeing this opera in a conventionally-sized opera house.

Read more...

The Pirates of Penzance, Scottish Opera, Theatre Royal, Glasgow

David Nice

Of all the Savoy operas, this merry clash of pirates, policemen and a Major-General flanked by an entire chorus of loving daughters finds Sullivan most in tune with the mid-19th century Italian opera he so lovingly spoofs. So why can’t Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production be similarly fleet-footed with Gilbert’s resourceful, literate lyrics and whimsical plotting? 

Read more...

Wozzeck, English National Opera

Edward Seckerson

If you should take your seats prematurely in the London Coliseum you’ll find yourself confronted with a group of serving British soldiers. You’ll shift a little uneasily under their gaze. There they are, staring, smoking, loitering; there we are, on a visit to the opera. There’s a disconnect. Among those soldiers is Wozzeck (Leigh Melrose), the eponymous anti-hero of Alban Berg's operatic masterpiece.

Read more...

Don Carlo, Royal Opera

David Nice

An operatic truism still doing the rounds declares that for Verdi's Il trovatore you need four of the greatest singers in the world. For Don Carlo, his biggest opus in every way, you need six. Nicholas Hytner's Covent Garden staging hits the mark third time around with five, the exception being a very honourable replacement for what would have been an interesting piece of casting.

Read more...

La bohème, English National Opera

alexandra Coghlan

I’m not one to get misty-eyed over La bohème (unless it be a red mist of rage), but this second revival of Jonathan Miller’s production at English National Opera brought me closer than any yet to understanding the snuffling, lip-quivering reactions of those around me in the Coliseum stalls. And if it wasn’t exactly emotion that got me there, then perhaps it was something even better: sentimental delight in joyous, glorious music-making.

Read more...

Mangan, Royal Academy Opera Students, BBCSO, Denève, Barbican Hall

David Nice

Highly sexed cockerels and cats, a lovesick lion and a ballet of frogs might not seem like a recipe, or rather a menagerie, for profundity. Yet in two ravishing French man (or child)-meets-beast fables for the stage, Poulenc and Ravel are quite capable of tearing at our heartstrings. That they did so unremittingly last night was very largely due to the supernaturally beautiful sounds master conjuror Stéphane Denève drew from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Read more...

Monteverdi Choir, London Symphony Orchestra, Gardiner, Barbican Hall

David Nice

Backed up by reasonably adventurous orchestral programming, lucky conductors can forge a strong Stravinsky evening by picking and mixing from his five ancient Greek rituals. Sir John Eliot Gardiner, unintentionally homaging the late Sir Colin Davis who at least in earlier days would have jumped to such a pairing, chose to celebrate his 70th birthday with the extremes of white balletic lyric poem Apollon musagète and hard-hitting blackest tragedy Oedipus Rex.

Read more...

Juan Diego Flórez and friends, Barbican Hall

alexandra Coghlan

It takes a certain kind of artist to book American mezzo-extraordinaire Joyce DiDonato as a supporting act. It’s a risk. Even if you happen to be Juan Diego Flórez. But it’s one that actually paid off on the first night of Flórez’s three-concert residency at the Barbican.

Read more...

Pages

latest in today

'We are bowled over!' Thank you for your messages... ...
Bookish, U&Alibi review - sleuthing and skulduggery in a...

As a sometime writer of Poirot, Sherlock and Christmas ghost stories,...

Album: Spafford Campbell - Tomorrow Held

Guitarist Louis Campbell and fiddle player Owen Spafford started playing together as teenagers in the National Youth Folk Ensemble when Sam...

The Estate, National Theatre review - hugely entertaining, b...

The first rule for brown people, says the main character – played by BAFTA-winner Adeel Akhtar – in this highly entertaining dramedy, is not to...

Music Reissues Weekly: Mike Taylor - Pendulum, Trio

Wheels of Fire was Cream’s third album. Issued in the US in June 1968 and in the UK two months later, it was a double LP. One record was...

The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire review - a mysterious silence

A glamorous black woman sits in a Forties bar under a Vichy cop’s gaze, cigarette tilted at an angle, till two male companions join her in...

Youssou N'Dour and Super Étoile de Dakar, Roundhouse re...

There is a freshness about a show by Youssou N’Dour that never seems to lose its glow. He still has one of the great voices of Africa, a versatile...

BBC Proms: First Night, Batiashvili, BBCSO, Oramo review - g...

The auditorium and arena were packed – and the stage even more so, bursting at the seams with players and singers: the perfect set-up for a First...

Album: Bonnie Dobson & The Hanging Stars - Dreams

What a great album – and what a great story to lift the heart in these fetid times. A story that crosses oceans and decades and brings together a...

Harvest review - blood, barley and adaptation

Lovers of a particular novel, when it’s adapted as a movie, often want book and movie to fit together as a hand in a glove. You want it to be like...