Opera Reviews
Das Rheingold, Royal Opera review - high drama and dark comedyTuesday, 25 September 2018
Keith Warner’s production of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen was first seen at Covent Garden between 2004 and 2006, and is now back for a third and final series of full runs, chiefly to catch the Brünnhilde of Nina Stemme in three of the operas, continuing into November. Read more... |
Isouard's Cendrillon, Bampton Classical Opera review - stepsisters shine in fairy-tale bagatelleWednesday, 19 September 2018
Cinderella as opera in French: of late, the palm has always gone to Massenet's adorable (as in a-dor-Ah-bler) confection, and it should again soon when Glyndebourne offers a worthy home to the master's magic touch. Read more... |
Parsifal, Saffron Opera Group review - drama and focusTuesday, 18 September 2018
It is a pleasure to report on the continuing success of the Saffron Opera Wagner project. The organisation was formed in 2013, and since then has presented concert performances of the Ring cycle and Meistersinger, and now Parsifal, all with an amateur orchestra and chorus and a cast of mostly lesser-known professionals. Read more... |
War and Peace, Welsh National Opera review - an Operation Barbarossa that comes offMonday, 17 September 2018
What lunatic would ever have the idea of turning War and Peace into an opera? Well, maybe if you, a composer, had found yourself in Moscow in June 1941 when news of the German invasion reached the Soviet capital, you might have decided to mount an Operation Barbarossa of your own, and that’s in all but name what Prokofiev did. The project occupied him on and off for the rest of his life (he died in 1953 on the same day as Stalin), and it never quite reached a definitive form. Read more... |
Tosca, Opera North review - exciting update, strong on sonic thrillsMonday, 17 September 2018
Puccini’s Tosca isn’t a subtle work, and this, Opera North’s fourth production since the company’s founding in 1978, is occasionally too loud and crude. But it’s undeniably powerful. Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, British Youth Opera review - perfect poise in slippery StravinskyFriday, 07 September 2018
So it's been sellouts for half-baked if well-cast productions of The Rake's Progress and now Britten's Paul Bunyan at Wilton's Music Hall, while British Youth Opera's classy Stravinsky in the admittedly larger Peacock Theatre, several hundred yards away from the Hogarth Rake paintings in Sir John Soane's Museum, played to a half-empty house, last night, at least. Read more... |
Prom 71, DiDonato, Tamestit, ORR, Gardiner review - concert Berlioz as bracing theatreThursday, 06 September 2018
How do you make your mark in a crucial last week after the Olympian spectaculars of Kirill Petrenko's Proms with the Berlin Philharmonic? Read more... |
Paul Bunyan, ENO, Wilton's Music Hall review - talent cabined and confinedWednesday, 05 September 2018
It's Britten outside-in time for English National Opera. Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, which played host earlier this year to an only partially convincing production of his 1950s masterpiece The Turn of the Screw, would have been the perfect choice for the prelapsarian American forests of his pre-Grimes operetta/musical Paul Bunyan. Read more... |
Vanessa, Glyndebourne review - blowsy histrionics and a great finaleMonday, 06 August 2018
"Sounds like an opera by Handel," said a friend when I told him that I was going to see Vanessa at Glyndebourne. Read more... |
Proms 25 / 26 review - Russian masters, noodling guitar, late-night perfectionFriday, 03 August 2018
Sometimes the more modestly scaled Proms work best in the Albert Hall. Not that there was anything but vast ambition and electrifying communication from soprano Anna Prohaska and the 17-piece Il Giardino Armonico under Giovanni Antonini, making that 18 when he chose to take up various pipes (★★★★★). Read more... |
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