Opera Reviews

Così Fan Tutte, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

ismene Brown Sunday, 23 May 2010

Nick Hytner's production of 'Così fan tutte': from a cool start to a blazingly tense end

Cosi fan tutte’s arc of human experience is peculiarly effective when heard at Glyndebourne. With the mid-way picnic and wine in the setting sun, how much more aware are you of how easy it is as a day goes by to take leave of one’s senses and behave in a very silly way with serious consequences. Most seriously, to discover things about oneself that one did not want to know.

Rusalka, Opera North

graham Rickson Saturday, 22 May 2010

A thousand miles away from the Disney version, the transformation scene in Dvořák’s Rusalka is bleak and terrifying. With not a cauldron, bat or cobweb to be seen, the heroine is strapped to an operating table before imbibing the witch’s magic potion intravenously. Then her legs, until now swaddled together, are literally torn apart. It’s a brutal, shocking moment; no surprise that some audience members giggled nervously.

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Ottone in Villa, Barbican Hall

alexandra Coghlan Saturday, 22 May 2010

Sonia Prina enjoys some rare moments of comedy as Vivaldi's gullible Emperor

A beloved regular of concert hall, radio and recording, the music of Vivaldi has more or less failed to find its way into the contemporary opera house. If we are to believe his own claims, the composer died with over 90 operas to his credit – double the output of even the extraordinarily prolific Handel – making the omission all the more striking. And suspicious. In...

Billy Budd, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

David Nice Thursday, 20 May 2010

HMS Indomitable: Billy Budd, good but flawed, and on his way to a terrible death

Silence. Near-darkness. Oozy weeds of orchestral strings twist in the mind of Edward Fairfax Vere (John Mark Ainsley), remembering the tragic events of 1797 when he was Captain of the HMS Indomitable. From that awe-inspiring start through to one of the most upsetting of onstage murders, perhaps the greatest parade of major and minor chords in all opera and beyond to some kind of redemption, Michael Grandage's Glyndebourne production - his first in the operatic sphere - of Britten's...

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Tosca, English National Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Tuesday, 18 May 2010

Rarely have I seen an opera where so much of the activity, so much of the detailed business of relating, loving, falling out and hating, has rung so true for so much of the time. And never do I remember this truthfulness coming from such simplicity. For, in terms of set, costume and conception, this is a very ordinary, recognisable, dependable, 19th-century Tosca.

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La Fille Du Régiment, Royal Opera

ismene Brown Monday, 17 May 2010

You can take the girl out of the barracks but you can’t take the barracks out of the girl would be one way to sum up Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (Daughter of the Regiment), which I can’t conceive could have a more ribtickling production, more brilliantly sung, than the delight that opened last night at Covent Garden. Kill, as they say, to get a ticket. It has Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Flórez, Ann Murray and Dawn French, and in a starring supporting role comes one of the...

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After Life, Barbican

alexandra Coghlan Sunday, 16 May 2010

"We need to inform you officially. Mr Walter, you died yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss." It comes as no great surprise to learn that Michel van der Aa’s opera After Life is based on a Japanese film. The Borgesian hyper-real scenario, the no-place location and meditative pacing all point, or rather - rejecting anything so crass - bow respectfully to their original source.

Juan Diego Florez, Barbican Hall

Edward Seckerson Saturday, 08 May 2010

Can we clear something up once and for all, please? Yet again this week an all too familiar headline caught my eye: “Is Juan Diego Florez the heir apparent to Pavarotti?” Or words to that effect. Why do these lazy (and/or ill-informed) editors and their headline writers keep asking the same rhetorical question? Surely they should know by now that the answer is a great big resounding “no”.

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Powder Her Face, RO, Linbury Studio Theatre

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Thursday, 29 April 2010

Sexy but not scandalous: the 'vocally terrific' Joan Rodgers as the Duchess

Let's get straight to the fellatio, shall we. The blow job - and its Polaroid rendition - that led to the 1960s divorce trial of the dissolute Duchess of Argyll forms the centrepiece aria (an aria that "begins with words and ends with humming") in Thomas Adès's opera Powder Her Face. And how good we were: as silent as a row of...

Aida, Royal Opera House

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Tuesday, 27 April 2010

David McVicar's new Aida production had an opening mise en scène of such unashamed ugliness, a revolving main feature (a wall of scaffolding) of such audacious featurelessness, a wardrobe of such brazen tastelessness (think Dungeons and Dragons), that my critical faculties sort of went into a coma.

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