Opera Reviews
Don Pasquale, Glyndebourne on TourMonday, 24 October 2011
Who would have thought that in a comic opera by Donizetti, least orchestra-indulgent of Italian composers, the conductor could be paramount? Read more... |
The Queen of Spades, Opera NorthSunday, 23 October 2011
This new production, Opera North’s first, sounds fantastic – Tchaikovsky’s lurid colours are brilliantly painted, and the compact dimensions of the Grand Theatre mean that the big orchestral tuttis have a devastating impact. Richard Farnes’s conducting is faultless – this music really swoons, screams and seduces. And despite the occasionally overpowering volume, Farnes never lets his orchestral playing drown out the singers. Read more... |
Der Fliegende Holländer, Royal OperaWednesday, 19 October 2011
Whether or not we believe Wagner’s retrospective rebranding of the opera as a prototype music-drama, “a complete, unbroken web”, Der Fliegende Holländer reliably makes for a vivid evening’s entertainment. Which makes it all the more strange that this is only the work’s third outing at the Royal Opera in almost 20 years. Read more... |
Xerxes, Britten Theatre, Royal College of MusicSaturday, 08 October 2011
“Morning at the airfield: King Xerxes admires the new Spitfire, which he hopes will transform his continental campaign.” If the title – emphatically Xerxes rather than Serse – hadn’t already given the game away, the synopsis for English Touring Opera’s newest Handel production makes it quite clear that we’re not in Kansas (or Italy, or Persia for that matter) any more. Read more... |
Katya Kabanova, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 08 October 2011
Katie Mitchell’s production of what many regard as Janáček’s greatest opera began life 10 years ago on the stage of Cardiff’s New Theatre; and there are times in this revival when you feel its director Robin Tebbutt’s yearning to be back in that constricted environment, so much better suited to the stifling world which destroys the work’s repressed, self-loathing heroine. Read more... |
The Marriage of Figaro, English National OperaThursday, 06 October 2011
Fiona Shaw's new production of The Marriage of Figaro for the ENO focuses on the theme of entrapment. Her first victim? A noisy bee. Don Basilio finds himself so harassed by its buzzing, he confines it to the body of a harpsichord. Magically, a few seconds later, the low hum reappears - on strings and bassoons. Read more... |
Ruddigore, Opera NorthSaturday, 01 October 2011
Revived with almost indecent haste, Jo Davies’s 2010 production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore now feels even more polished and slick. Slickness is not a derogatory term here; this staging hits the spot in pretty much every way – musically, dramatically and visually. Read more... |
Madam Butterfly, Mid Wales OperaSaturday, 24 September 2011
There are several types of garden opera, and there are also, happily, several types of cinema opera. You can rustle your Werthers through a relay from the Met and endure the touchy-feely interviews with panting mega-sopranos just out of Verdi’s “Sempre libera”; or you can pick up a small touring company like Mid Wales Opera at the Pontardawe Arts Centre or the Aberdare Coliseum, and watch real opera sung by human beings in unhelpful surroundings. |
The Passenger, English National OperaTuesday, 20 September 2011
No two creative artists have a stronger right to make a valid statement about Auschwitz than a Polish-born composer who escaped his family's fate by fleeing to Russia, only to fall into another anti-Semitic trap, and a Polish writer whose clear-eyed transmutation of her three years in the camp inspired the opera. Neither, of course, guarantees the end result of great art. Read more... |
Faust, Royal OperaMonday, 19 September 2011
That Faust - Gounod's curdled Victorian dessert of an opera, an overwhipped melange of melodrama and misogyny, topped with grand 19th-century dollops of religiosity - achieves a level of profundity that at one stage nearly had me in tears is an absolute miracle. |
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