Opera Reviews
Owen Wingrave/ Pavel Haas Quartet, Aldeburgh FestivalMonday, 16 June 2014
What a red letter day it is when a work you’ve always thought of as problematic seems at last, if only temporarily, to have no kind of fault or flaw. That was the case for me on Sunday afternoon with Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, launching this year’s Aldeburgh Festival with an ideal cast fused as one with the young Britten-Pears Orchestra thanks to the self-evidently intensive collaboration of director Neil Bartlett and conductor Mark Wigglesworth. Read more... |
San Giovanni Battista/The Cooper, Guildhall Milton Court TheatreSaturday, 14 June 2014
The practical considerations and limitations of choosing a work for a student showcase can lead to some wonderfully original programming. It doesn’t get much more original than a pairing of Thomas Arne’s ballad opera The Cooper with Stradella’s oratorio San Giovanni Battista, currently being staged by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Read more... |
Vert-Vert, Garsington OperaWednesday, 11 June 2014
How delicious that Garsington Opera has turned to Offenbach. The main impetus for this cheering development, taken up by Artistic Director Douglas Boyd, is conductor David Parry, who both translates (extremely well) and wields the baton. Read more... |
Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival OperaMonday, 09 June 2014
Sex farce, class comedy, crime thriller, existential tragedy, supernatural shocker - Don Giovanni is, as Jonathan Kent notes about his production in the Glyndebourne programme, a cabinet of curiosities. Read more... |
Benvenuto Cellini, English National OperaFriday, 06 June 2014
Tumblers, confetti, stiltwalkers, flags, crowds, a giant skull, and that’s just the overture. If anyone thought that Terry Gilliam might struggle to match the scope, scale or impact of 2011’s Damnation of Faust with his follow-up then they’re probably feeling rather foolish right about now. Read more... |
Peter Grimes, Grange ParkSaturday, 31 May 2014
It takes a brave opera company indeed to stage Peter Grimes this summer. Benjamin Britten’s 2013 centenary celebrations took us to “peak Britten”, with performances of all his major works as well as the unprecedented, outstanding Grimes on the Beach. Then, this January, David Alden’s production of the opera returned to the Coliseum: direct, theatrical and if anything more potent than five years before. Read more... |
Dialogues des Carmélites, Royal OperaFriday, 30 May 2014
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is a special and very particular opera. There is nothing else quite like it. Just as the drama - set to the composer’s own libretto - teeters between fear and faith, so too does Poulenc’s score, an extraordinary apposition of austerity and lushness where belief is harmonically consonant, festooned in seraphic harp glissandi and warmly homogeneous middle-voices. Read more... |
Der Rosenkavalier, CBSO, Nelsons, Symphony Hall BirminghamSunday, 25 May 2014
A trio of Rosenkavaliers: what more could one want as we near Richard Strauss’s 150th birthday? Well, more of the less often performed operas, for a start. Read more... |
Moses und Aron, Welsh National OperaSunday, 25 May 2014
Schoenberg’s last, unfinished, opera, seldom staged, might almost have been written for the Welsh. At its heart is some of the most refined and intricate choral writing since Bach, but linked to stage directions so complicated that one wonders whether the composer had any idea of the technical difficulties he was putting in the way of a fully realized production. Read more... |
Eugene Onegin, GlyndebourneMonday, 19 May 2014
Is this the same Tatyana whose life depended on every word of her letter to straw idol Onegin at the 2009 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition? Then, Ekaterina Shcherbachenko – she’s since dropped the first “h” in transliteration – gave the most convincing, nuanced interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s famous Letter Scene, his reason for setting Pushkin’s verse-novel about youthful idealism and lost illusions. Read more... |
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