Opera
Best of 2024: OperaFriday, 27 December 2024
Ireland takes the palm for best of 2024, with Wexford hitting comic heights among its three rarities in Donizettian let’s-make-an-opera, while Irish National Opera gave us a world-class Salome, a Vivaldi rarity strongly cast, a Rigoletto featuring... Read more... |
Help to give theartsdesk a future!Friday, 31 January 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... |
La rondine, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - sumptuous orchestral playing in an underrated scoreWednesday, 11 December 2024
There are no battlement leaps or murderous vows, no pistols or daggers, not so much as a slight cough disturbs the serene plot of La rondine – the Puccini opera once labelled a “poor man’s Traviata”.And yet it’s all the better for it. This is a... Read more... |
L’étoile, RNCM, Manchester review - lavish and cheerful absurdityWednesday, 11 December 2024
Emmanuel Chabrier’s L’étoile is not exactly a French farce, but it comes from a post-Offenbach era (1877 saw its premiere) when cheerful absurdity was certainly expected, especially at Offenbach’s old theatre, the Bouffes Parisiens.In some ways it... Read more... |
The Pirates of Penzance, English National Opera review - fresh energy in clear-sighted G&SSaturday, 07 December 2024
“Comedy is a serious thing,” quoth David Garrick. Gilbert and Sullivan knew it, and so does Mike Leigh, having bequeathed to ENO a clear and unfussy Pirates of Penzance. It does renewed honour to Victorian genius in Sarah Tipple’s freshly-cast... Read more... |
Rigoletto, Irish National Opera / Murrihy, Collins, NCH Dublin review - greatness everywhereMonday, 02 December 2024
How many Rigolettos have regular operagoers among you sat through where there wasn’t some major defect, in either the production or the three major roles? Here, there is none. INO’s jester and Duke are well cast, its Gilda supernaturally perfect in... Read more... |
The Elixir of Love, English National Opera review - a tale of two halvesSaturday, 16 November 2024
Sparkling Italian comic opera might have been just the tonic at this time. Trouble is, the bar was set so high recently by Wexford Festival Opera’s Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali, aka Viva la Mamma, that this better known, less malleable if... Read more... |
The Sound Voice Project, Linbury Theatre review - an art installation that has strayed into an opera houseSaturday, 16 November 2024
What does it mean to have a voice? And what does it mean to lose it? Those are the questions the award-winning Sound Voice Project has explored – through research, collaboration and live performance – since its beginnings in 2016. The latest... Read more... |
The Tales of Hoffmann, Royal Opera review - three-headed monster feels baggier than everFriday, 08 November 2024
Having all but sunk one seemingly unassailable opéra comique, Bizet’s Carmen, director Damiano Michieletto goes some way to helping out another with so many problems. Not far enough, alas, but the chosen edition, with its reams of recitative (mostly... Read more... |
Rigoletto, English National Opera review - another hit for Miller's MobThursday, 31 October 2024
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after decade. Well, Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York mafiosi version of Verdi’s Rigoletto first arrived on... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Wexford Festival Opera - let's make three operasWednesday, 30 October 2024
Name three operas framing dramas within, and you’d probably come up with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges. You might be harder pressed to come up with three more, but Wexford Festival... Read more... |
Albert Herring, Scottish Opera review - fun, frivolity, and fine music-makingFriday, 25 October 2024
Having premiered at the Lammermuir Festival earlier this year, Daisy Evans’s new production of Britten’s Albert Herring is a gently funny and sweetly nostalgic telling of what’s essentially a coming of age comedy. In fact, the 80s costumes and the... Read more... |
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