Opera Reviews
Don Pasquale, Opera Holland ParkWednesday, 08 June 2011
Nothing says summer opera quite like the skittish melodies and Neapolitan oom-pah-pah of a Donizetti overture. It doesn’t get much cheekier or more playful than this, the kind of music that makes you long for a pea shooter to pelt opera-goers with a stealthy fire of peanuts, or daub the bald head of the concert-goer in front of you during his Act II siesta. When set against the greenery and obbligato peacocks of... Read more... |
Tosca, Royal OperaTuesday, 07 June 2011
Tosca-at-Covent-Garden is a commodity, like bacon-for-breakfast - a pricier commodity, to be true, at officially up to £229.50 a seat, but in both cases people want to get what they expect. Read more... |
Il Turco in Italia, Garsington OperaSaturday, 04 June 2011
What would opera do without the postwar British sitcom? Garsington Opera's new production of Rossini's Il Turco in Italia at Wormsley last night saw yet another opera buffa being sold to 21st-century man using the gestural language of 'Allo 'Allo and Fawlty Towers. It was as easy and enjoyable as a night in with UK Gold - but much nicer, for we were surrounded by fields and forests.
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Rigoletto, Grange Park OperaFriday, 03 June 2011
They say that old sins cast long shadows, but these are nothing compared to the shadows cast by old productions. To set Verdi’s Rigoletto in 1950s America inevitably courts comparison with that operatic patriarch, Jonathan Miller’s New York Mafia reworking. Read more... |
The Magic Flute, Garsington OperaFriday, 03 June 2011
Tamino and Pamina, in Mozart’s great masonic opera, go through fire and water, as well as trials spiritual and emotional, before achieving their sunlit triumph at the end of it all. They would have sympathy with Anthony Whitworth-Jones and his Garsington Opera team in what must have been quite as frightening a battle to locate, plan, design and build their new pavilion on the Getty estate at Wormsley, near Stokenchurch on the M40, within barely more than a year. Read more... |
Turandot, Welsh National Opera, CardiffSunday, 29 May 2011
No point in going to WNO’s Turandot expecting to see images of old Beijing, for all the charming lady in a Chinese floral hat on the programme cover. The curtain goes up on the inside of an enormous galvanised dustbin festooned with photos of what might be lads from the football team but are actually Turandot’s victims to date. Read more... |
Ariodante, Barbican HallWednesday, 25 May 2011
Handel spread dazzle and desolation evenly enough through the lead roles of Ariodante. A suitably stellar line-up for last night's concert performance at the Barbican was, therefore, awaiting us. Yet, as so often with Handel, the packed ship and its glistening booty inevitably tilted to one passenger and one casket of gems: to Joyce DiDonato and "Scherza infida". Read more... |
Macbeth, Royal OperaTuesday, 24 May 2011
The staging smacks of Covent Garden's familiar Verdi-by-numbers - surprising since it's the often inventive Phyllida Lloyd's concept, revived by Harry Fehr, but it might as well be the inert pageantry of Elijah Moshinsky - while the necessary singing-acting, no doubt as a result, is mostly one-dimensional and overcooked. Verdi's first confident shot at music-theatre, revised for Paris in 1864 but already vivid in outline four years before Rigoletto broke the mould, deserves better.... Read more... |
Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival OperaMonday, 23 May 2011
Two 1950s Mozarts in one weekend might seem like pressing the contemporaneity of great art unnecessarily far. But Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, revived on Sunday, is a much less crude update than the WNO Così. Read more... |
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Glyndebourne Festival OperaSunday, 22 May 2011
So the world didn't end yesterday as predicted, and Wagner's divine comedy about the meaning of art has weathered the ironic apocalypse following Hitler’s misappropriation. Bayreuth reels, but we Brits are lucky to have two stagings in under a year which take the humanism at face value. Scaling it down for Glyndebourne's intimate summer paradise, given director David McVicar’s knack of finding a plausible historical setting, should have offered a viable alternative to... Read more... |
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