Opera Reviews

Hippolyte et Aricie, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Sunday, 30 June 2013

Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote Hippolyte et Aricie in 1733 at the age of 50. It was his first opera and his greatest. In its five acts, its visits to the woods of Diana, the groves of Venus, the fires of Pluto and the domestic meltdown in the house of Phaedra, is some of the most assured, inventive and stylish music ever written for the stage. As operatic debuts go, it is a miracle.

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Simon Boccanegra, Royal Opera

Ismene Brown Friday, 28 June 2013

Revivals are for a conductor to show off some voices he’s discovered, do some role debuts, develop some careers, and as far as the production's concerned pour new wine into old bottles. There was some good new wine in this revival of Elijah Moshinsky's 22-year-old production. The Abkhazian soprano Hibla Gerzmava was the shining beauty, doing her first Amelia, with a sterling new tenor voice coming from the American Russell Thomas.

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Les Pêcheurs de Perles, Opera Holland Park

alexandra Coghlan Wednesday, 26 June 2013

Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles is an unfashionably generous indulgence of a score tethered to an unfashionable and unredeemable plot. There’s not a contemporary director alive who can make the wretched thing work, so perhaps it would be better if we all just accepted this and closed our eyes through a Covent Garden revival from the 1980s with some of the finest voices in the business.

BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition 2013 Final, BBC Four

David Nice Monday, 24 June 2013

Once in a blue moon, the judges would seem to have got it wrong. I can think only of 2001, when stunning Latvian mezzo Elina Garanča failed to win the coveted goblet but has since gone on to deserved fame as one of the top half-dozen singers on the international stage today.

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The Ring, Longborough Festival

stephen Walsh Monday, 24 June 2013

"This," Lizzie Graham writes in the programme book of the current Longborough Festival, “is definitely the test of whether or not it is possible to put on a convincing Ring in a small, privately-owned country theatre.” I don’t think Lizzie or her husband, Martin, the festival’s founders and owners of the theatre, can have seriously doubted that the answer would be yes. Serious doubts seem not to be part of their entrepreneurial make-up; or if they are, they suppress them.

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Gloriana, Royal Opera

David Nice Friday, 21 June 2013

Britten’s coronation opera, paying homage less to our own ambiguous queen than to the private-public tapestries of Verdi’s Aida and Don Carlo, is not the rarity publicity would have you believe, at least in its homeland. English National Opera successfully rehabilitated it in the 1980s, with Sarah Walker resplendent as regent. Phyllida Lloyd’s much revived Opera North production gave Josephine Barstow the role of a lifetime, enshrined in an amazing if selective film.

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Three Church Parables, Aurora Orchestra, Aldeburgh Festival

Roderic Dunnett Wednesday, 19 June 2013

In Britten’s centenary the Aldeburgh Festival has come up with two mesmerising opera happenings. The innovation is to stage Peter Grimes on the town’s beach, a few hundred yards from the composer’s beachside Aldeburgh first home, amid a splurge of decaying fishing boats. The daring recreation is to present all three of his orchestrally bewitching 1960s Church Parables in their original setting, Orford Church, where Peter Pears famously created three roles: the distraught Ma

Peter Grimes, Aldeburgh Beach

Kimon Daltas Tuesday, 18 June 2013

First things first. There are limited tickets still available for this run of Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach but there won’t be for long, so move fast. You can read the rest of this review later; the next few minutes could make the difference between experiencing one of the most memorable performances of your life and just finding out what you’ve missed out on.

Death in Venice, English National Opera

Ismene Brown Sunday, 16 June 2013

Austere, beautiful, heartbreaking, streaked with genius - that goes for both Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice and Deborah Warner’s remarkable production of it for ENO, returning all too briefly to the Coliseum, with a superb central performance. Besiege the box office for one of the four remaining performances if you want to see contemporary operatic art refined to its most personal and powerful.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Linbury Studio Theatre

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Saturday, 15 June 2013

If you were new to contemporary opera, you might think it was forbidden for modern works to be funny. Tragedy is still the default setting for major commissions. You only get serious money if you have serious thoughts and serious music, it seems. At the Royal Opera, the policy is to stage unfunny, ancient buffas on the main stage and sharp, modern ones in the Linbury Studio Theatre. Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest is the latest.