Opera Reviews

Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Ismene Brown Monday, 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.

Benvenuto Cellini, English National Opera

alexandra Coghlan Friday, 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.

Comment

Peter Grimes, Grange Park

alexandra Coghlan Saturday, 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.

Dialogues des Carmélites, Royal Opera

Edward Seckerson Friday, 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.

Der Rosenkavalier, CBSO, Nelsons, Symphony Hall Birmingham

David Nice Sunday, 25 May 2014

A trio of Rosenkavaliers: what more could one want as we near Richard Strauss’s 150^th birthday? Well, more of the less often performed operas, for a start.

Comment

Moses und Aron, Welsh National Opera

stephen Walsh Sunday, 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.

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Eugene Onegin, Glyndebourne

David Nice Monday, 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.

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Der Rosenkavalier, Glyndebourne

David Nice Sunday, 18 May 2014

What spontaneous use might a silver rose take on after its formal presentation by a chubby cherub of a cavalier to a bartered bride-to-be? This and a thousand other score-co-ordinated details are things you never can predict in the hands of that chameleonic yet rigorous director Richard Jones. He throws out most of the meticulous stage directions in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s rococo libretto for Richard Strauss and finds his own. You may not like them – I mostly did – but you can’t say that...

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Gawain, Barbican

Kimon Daltas Saturday, 17 May 2014

Part of the Birtwistle at 80 series at the Barbican, this not-quite-semi-staged Gawain ended up being held back a little by its shoestring production, where a straight concert performance might have transcended its limitations.

Così fan tutte, English National Opera

alexandra Coghlan Saturday, 17 May 2014

A cheeky series of signs raised at the start of Phelim McDermott’s new Così fan tutte for English National Opera promise “Big Arias”, “Intrigue”, “Lust” and “Chocolate” (among other things). Big pledges, all. And almost all delivered by this witty, exuberant and quietly revisionist production of Mozart’s challenging comedy.