Opera
Help to give theartsdesk a future!Wednesday, 01 October 2025
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.It followed some hectic and intensive months when a disparate and eclectic team of arts and culture writers went ahead with an ambitious plan – to... Read more... |
Peter Grimes, Welsh National Opera review - febrile energy and rageTuesday, 08 April 2025
Emotions run high at WNO these days. When the company’s co-directors, Sarah Crabtree and Adele Thomas, feel impelled to take to the stage at the end of the first night of Peter Grimes, in front of the entire company, chorus, orchestra and all, you... Read more... |
Owen Wingrave, RNCM, Manchester review - battle of a pacifistWednesday, 02 April 2025
It’s quite ironic that the Royal Northern College of Music should have invited, as director of this, Britten’s avowedly pacifist opera, Orpha Phelan – whose version of his Billy Budd for Opera North nearly 10 years ago contained one of the most... Read more... |
Tales of Apollo and Hercules, London Handel Festival review - compelling elements, but a failed experimentMonday, 31 March 2025
Over the last three years of the London Handel Festival, two experimental productions have proved to be highlights – not just of the festival itself – but of the musical year. In 2023, Adele Thomas’s In The Realms of Sorrow brought sweat,... Read more... |
La finta giardiniera, The Mozartists, Cadogan Hall review - blooms in the wild gardenWednesday, 26 March 2025
Just now, the notion of a long-term project that concludes in 2041 sounds like an optimistic bet on the far future worthy of some 18th-century Enlightenment philosophe – Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, maybe. The musicians of The Mozartists are clearly... Read more... |
Der fliegende Holländer, Irish National Opera review - sailing to nowhereMonday, 24 March 2025
So much looked promising for Irish National Opera’s first Wagner: the casting, certainly, the conductor – Music Director Fergus Sheil knows and loves this music – and the venue (the Libeskind-designed Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, proven ideal for... Read more... |
Die Zauberflöte, Royal Academy of Music review - first-rate youth makes for a moving experienceFriday, 21 March 2025
Tamino in the operating theatre hallucinating serpents? Sarastro’s acolytes wheeling lit-up plasma packs? From the central part of the Overture onwards – just when we thought we'd escape directorial intervention in Olivia Clarke’s racy conducting -... Read more... |
Mansfield Park, Guildhall School review - fun when frothy, chugging in romantic entanglementsTuesday, 04 March 2025
Let’s call it Jane Austen fit for the West End, but with opera singers. The fact that it also serves as a fun ensemble piece for students is also very much in favour of Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park, with a neatly telescoped and often witty... Read more... |
Uprising, Glyndebourne review - didactic community opera superbly performedSunday, 02 March 2025
The score is effective, and rewarding to perform, but derivative. The libretto uses every cliché, or truism, about save-the-planet youth activism in the book; it’s didactic, not dramatic. Direction, design and lighting sometimes feel unfinished. Yet... Read more... |
Fledermaus, Irish National Opera review - sex, please, we're Viennese/American/Russian/IrishMonday, 24 February 2025
Let’s finally face the elephant in the room: the most popular Viennese operetta, packed with hit numbers, no longer works on the stage as a whole. The central party, yes, never more high-energy delight than here, with a cast of 13 and 10... Read more... |
The Capulets and the Montagues, English Touring Opera review - the wise guys are singing like canariesMonday, 24 February 2025
A year ago, after a deeply disappointing Manon Lescaut at Hackney Empire, I wrote here that English Touring Opera had often excelled in the past, and would do so again. The company hasn’t taken long to prove the point.Severe critics might argue that... Read more... |
Mary, Queen of Scots, English National Opera review - heroic effort for an overcooked history lessonMonday, 17 February 2025
Genius doesn't always tally with equal opportunities, to paraphrase Doris Lessing. Opera houses have a duty to put on new works by women composers; sometimes an instant classic emerges. But to revive a music drama that hardly made waves back in 1977... Read more... |
- 1 of 149
- ››
