Opera Reviews
Manon Lescaut, Welsh National OperaSunday, 09 February 2014
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. Read more...
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Don Giovanni, Royal OperaTuesday, 04 February 2014
If you don’t believe in the angels, or at least the good, of Don Giovanni, don’t stage it. Mozart may well be telling us, as Kasper Holten partly seems to be, that the antihero is a void, a mask-wearer and a creature of thrusting appetites, on his way to the abyss. Read more... |
Acis and Galatea, Mid Wales Opera, CardiffFriday, 31 January 2014
Handel’s “little opera”, as he called Acis and Galatea when he was composing it in 1718, probably survived while his true, full-length operas vanished from sight precisely because it was little, compact and manageable, like Purcell’s Dido or Pergolesi’s Serva padrona. Read more... |
Peter Grimes, English National OperaThursday, 30 January 2014
“Mind that door.” With the hurricane howling outside it’s no wonder the locals gathered in Auntie’s pub are yelling... but there is no door. Instead, a stage-wide sheet of corrugated iron rears up to let in Stuart Skelton’s storm-tossed Peter Grimes. Enlarging naturalistic, close-up detail into full-blooded, expressionist drama is typical of this frankly electrifying revival of David Alden’s revelatory production of Britten’s masterpiece. Read more... |
The Girl of the Golden West, Opera NorthWednesday, 22 January 2014
Puccini’s unlikely Spaghetti Western still convinces in Aletta Collins’ vivid new production. The incongruities in this uneven yet powerful work aren’t dodged but embraced. Most of them are musical: the sheer delight, for instance, of seeing stage action which occasionally resembles a jerky early Western played out to rich, blazing orchestral sonorities. Read more... |
Manon, Royal OperaWednesday, 15 January 2014
Massenet had just two lingering thoughts about Manon when he wrote his memoirs in 1910, a quarter-century after the opera's first performance. First, he enjoyed reminding himself how many times it had been performed (a staggering 763 by the time he finished the memoirs). Read more... |
Sonia Prina, Wigmore HallTuesday, 31 December 2013
The great Marilyn Horne used to joke that she was going to release an album entitled “Chestnuts for Chest Nuts”. She never did, but that leaves the door wide open for Sonia Prina whose dark, thrillingly low sound marks her out as the real deal, a genuine contralto. But the excitement of Prina in performance isn’t just about her extraordinary skill at using her unusual range. Read more... |
Classical and Opera 2013: A Year of AnniversariesSaturday, 28 December 2013
Which musical calendar year isn’t laden down with composer commemorations, too often a pretext for lazy and unimaginative planning? The last 12 months, with Verdi, Wagner and Britten as the birthday boys (in case you failed to hear), have raised the stakes. Read more... |
Fantasio, OAE, Elder, Royal Festival HallMonday, 16 December 2013
Readers who recall the 1872 Paris premiere of Offenbach’s Fantasio have had 141 years to wonder when its British debut would arrive. Read more... |
Parsifal, Royal OperaSunday, 01 December 2013
Is anyone else sick of creepy brotherhoods skewering the transcendent in Mozart’s and Wagner’s late operas? Both Sarastro’s cult and the company of the grail are in sore need of change - "fresh blood" would be an unfortunate term under the circumstances - when we first encounter them. Read more... |
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