fri 04/04/2025

Opera Reviews

Le docteur Miracle, Pop-up Opera, The Running Horse

David Nice

An orchestral musician recently told me that only one per cent of graduates from UK music colleges go on to take up a post in an established opera company or orchestra. You’d think, given such an alarming statistic, that there would be a lot of very good voices floating around trying to drum up work. Young talent is enterprisingly putting itself out there in a new wave of pub or site-specific fringe performances.

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La Fille du régiment, Royal Opera

David Nice

Roll up, roll up, to hear Juan Diego Flórez deliver his nine cheek-by-jowl top Cs in the umpteenth performance of Laurent Pelly’s slick, often funny Donizetti comedy. Does the whole thing still fizz? Only up to a point in Christian Räth's revival. Yet I’d still rather see this – or Don Pasquale, or L’elisir d’amore – any number of times than endure any more of the composer’s “unjustly neglected” tinpot tragedies.

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Rodelinda, English National Opera

David Nice

If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves.

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Boulevard Solitude, Welsh National Opera

stephen Walsh

Reviewing WNO’s Manon Lescaut a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that its director, Mariusz Treliński, had devised the production in terms of Henze’s Boulevard Solitude, “and simply tyre-levered the Puccini into it.” QED. Here are the same railway station, the same trains flashing by, the same barman, the same slinky, raincoated – or less – Manons (plural), the same general air of transient sleaze. Boris Kudlička’s designs have changed in detail but not in essence.

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The Fairy Queen, Bury Court Opera

Roderic Dunnett

Bury Court Opera acquired a pearl of great price when it persuaded Simon Over, music director of the Southbank Sinfonia and the Parliament Choir, to bring his 2010 production of Dido and Aeneas from Anghiari in Tuscany to perform in the beautifully appointed restored old barn just west of Farnham in Hampshire. It proved the launch of an alluring undertaking.

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Paul Bunyan, English Touring Opera, Linbury Studio Theatre

Kimon Daltas

Paul Bunyan, best described as a "choral operetta", was Britten’s first foray into the operatic, and much of its value is surely gleaned through the prism of subsequent successes. The composer withdrew it after its poorly received US premiere in 1941, and its rehabilitation didn’t begin until over 30 years later.

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HMS Pinafore, Hackney Empire

David Nice

Showboys will be boys – gym-bunny sailors, in this instance – as well as sisters, cousins, aunts, captain’s daughters and bumboat women. We know the ropes by now for Sasha Regan’s all-male Gilbert and Sullivan: a loving attempt to recreate, she says, the innocence of musical theatre in same-sex schools (mine, for which I played Sir Joseph Porter with a supporting army or navy of recorders, two cellos and piano, was mixed).

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King Priam, English Touring Opera, Linbury Studio Theatre

David Nice

Tippett’s selective, often compelling and mostly well-structured take on Trojan War myths will never capture the wider public’s imagination as much as even the least of Britten’s operas. His ideas sometimes pierce the soul but don’t stick there in the same way, and the human interest level never goes so deep. The sounds, though, are something else: a splintering of interest groups, or even a single instrument, to flank each character.

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Rigoletto, English National Opera

alexandra Coghlan

Old sins, the saying goes, cast long shadows. These are nothing, however, to the shadows cast by old productions. Jonathan Miller’s Mafia Rigoletto looms larger than most in this regard – a lowering giant of directorial inspiration, with 30 years in rep and as close to cult status as opera gets. As Christopher Alden’s new Rigoletto made his way through the darkened streets yesterday more than just assassins lurked in the shadows.

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Manon Lescaut, Welsh National Opera

stephen Walsh

As before, WNO have a theme for their new opera season: this time it’s Fallen Women, a topic that might well attract the attention of the Equal Opportunities Commission. Surely men have the right to fall as well; we await, in June, The Fall of the House of Usher, a much fairer piece than Puccini’s Manon Lescaut, which opened the company’s winter season in a new production by the Polish director Mariusz Treliński.

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