Opera Reviews

theartsdesk in Buxton: Dvořák rarity, Gluck tercentenary

philip Radcliffe Monday, 14 July 2014

Buxton has gone Bohemian, digging into Dvořák’s treasure trove and celebrating Gluck’s tercentenary. The choice of Dvořák’s The Jacobin fits the Buxton Festival tradition of rooting out neglected works, since this has been unjustly overlooked since the first performance in 1889. It’s an irony that this makes Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice an unexpected choice, being ever-popular since 1762.

The Queen of Spades, Grange Park Opera

stephen Walsh Friday, 11 July 2014

For my money, The Queen of Spades is one of the great nineteenth-century operas, a masterpiece of dramma per musica. There will always be pure spirits who cry “vulgar” at late Tchaikovsky. But the charge is absurd. Anyone with ears can hear the brilliance and refinement of this music, and anyone with feelings can sense Tchaikovsky’s love of his characters, all of them: the frail, the mad, the villainous, the beautiful and the damned. What more can you ask?

The Golden Cockerel, Diaghilev Festival, London Coliseum

David Nice Thursday, 10 July 2014

Rimsky-Korsakov’s bizarre final fantasy, puffing up Pushkin's short verse-tale to unorthodox proportions, has done better in Britain than any of his other operatic fairy-tales. That probably has something to do with its appearance in Paris, six years after the composer’s death in 1908, courtesy of a brave new experiment marshalled by that chameleonic impresario Sergei Diaghilev.

Pinnock's Passions, Handel's Garden, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Kimon Daltas Tuesday, 08 July 2014

The latest in a series of "Pinnock’s Passions" concerts at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse saw the doyen of period instrument performance lead a delightful exploration of Handel the musical borrower, entitled "Handel’s Garden". As Trevor Pinnock writes in the programme notes, "throughout his life as a composer he had the habit of taking cuttings, transplanting and grafting from works old and new".

Maria Stuarda, Royal Opera House

alexandra Coghlan Sunday, 06 July 2014

The Royal Opera House’s Maria Stuarda is the third major production of Donizetti’s historical opera in less than two years. First there was David McVicar’s kitschy-traditional production for the Met, then there was Rudolf Frey’s baffling concept-drama at Welsh National Opera, and now directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier add their voices to a conversation still trying to make sense of these passionate warring queens with their determinedly dispassionate music.

The Barber of Seville, Longborough Festival

stephen Walsh Friday, 04 July 2014

Speaking from the stage before curtain-up on The Barber, Longborough’s founder and chairman, Martin Graham, stressed the hard work put in by director Richard Studer and conductor Jonathan Lyness on their two 2014 productions, this one and Tosca. He wasn’t kidding. Read the programme and you find (for both operas): director, Richard Studer; designer, Richard Studer; costume, Richard Studer. Lyness conducting both works.

The Turn of the Screw, Opera Holland Park

alexandra Coghlan Wednesday, 02 July 2014

“Is this sheltered place the wicked world where things unspoken of have been?” The Governess’s question echoes through the careful suggestions and delicate temporal interweavings of Annilese Miskimmon’s The Turn of the Screw, twisting smiles into sordid suggestions, schoolrooms into places not of care but corruption.

Comment

La finta giardiniera, Glyndebourne

David Nice Sunday, 29 June 2014

There are two avenues down which to approach the well-kept flower beds of Mozart’s early operas. One is to be surprised how rarely the muse of fire which rages through Idomeneo, his first undisputed masterpiece, descends on a work composed just a few years earlier like La finta giardiniera (The Counterfeit Garden Girl), and that’s how I felt sitting through a performance of it for only the second time in my life.

Comment

Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera

David Nice Thursday, 26 June 2014

Can it really be 12 years since Antonio Pappano inaugurated his transformative era as the Royal Opera’s Music Director conducting Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos? Christof Loy’s production seemed so radical at the time.

Tosca, Longborough Festival

stephen Walsh Wednesday, 25 June 2014

For Longborough to open their new season with Tosca after last summer’s triumphant Wagner is to invoke Joseph Kerman’s famous diatribe against Puccini’s “shabby little shocker” in his fifties book Opera as Drama. Kerman used Wagner’s theories to pick holes in Puccini’s at times flagrant theatricality: which only goes to show what an untheoretical thing opera can be.