Opera
stephen.walsh
I find it hard to know quite what to make of Ainadamar, Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s one-act opera about the life and death of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, who was murdered in unknown circumstances – probably by Nationalist militia – in the early months of the Spanish civil war in August 1936.Composed in 2003, Ainadamar is described (anonymously) in the Cardiff programme as “a ground-breaking opera for the 21st century.” But in many ways it seems to me something of a throwback, not just to “portrait” operas like Adams’s Death of Klinghoffer or Glass’s Einstein/ Gandhi/ Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
It’s one of the great tragedies of Les Troyens that its composer never got to hear it performed in its entirety during his lifetime. This ravishing, big-hearted interpretation of the two of the most dramatic episodes in Virgil’s Aeneid was dismissed by orchestras that could not comprehend its technical or emotional demands, with the consequence that there was no attempt at a proper staging till 21 years after Berlioz's death.Last night’s astonishing performance of Berlioz's masterpiece by the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir conducted by Dinis Sousa (pictured Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
This was one of the more strait-laced concert performances, with few concessions to Wagner’s underlying stage drama. The soloists were in formal concert dress, strung out in a line at the front of the stage, with interaction between them limited to looks of anguish and the sparest of gestures. The shepherd boy in Act 1 was banished to the upper reaches of the organ gallery, and there was a substantial off-stage band in Act 2, but otherwise there was nothing to distract us from the music.But what music! Wagner's Overture to Tannhäuser is justly seen as a masterpiece in its own right, but under Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
György Kurtág is 97 and the last man standing of the post-war generation of avant-garde composers. Last night the Proms staged the UK premiere of his first opera, started in his eighties and premiered in 2018, a setting of Samuel Beckett’s typically mystifying play Endgame. Sadly, for all the brilliant passages of orchestral writing, and top-notch singing and playing, as an opera it’s a bit of a damp squib in which some minutes hung heavy.Kurtág is one of the great miniaturists – his life’s work is about 10 hours of music – but this opera is two solid hours without an interval (and it is Read more ...
David Nice
“There will be more incense,” promised Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati of the company’s annual visit to the Proms. He was talking to my Opera Zoom class between the final rehearsal and first performance of Poulenc’s great masterpiece about the martyrdom of Carmelite nuns during the French revolution, as directed by Barrie Kosky with unsparing horror and humanity. And now here was the operatic company of the year taking its final bow after a sellout run in Sussex.Ticciati was right: during earlier scenes in the convent, the hallowed atmosphere in the Albert Hall was such that over Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Whatever your opinion of Vaughan Williams, it’s unlikely that you think of him as an essentially theatrical composer. Yet he did write at least three important (as well as several less important) works for the stage: a ballet (not so-called), Job, a one-act opera (also not so-called), Riders to the Sea, and a full-length music drama, The Pilgrim’s Progress, based of course on Bunyan’s famous but probably no longer much read allegory of that name.Since its none too successful first performance at Covent Garden in 1951, VW’s Pilgrim’s Progress has suffered much the same fate as its source. One Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
It never rains but it pours – and hails, snows or, above all, thunders. The presiding tone of Semele, in Adele Thomas’s new production for Glyndebourne, matches the current English summer with its grey skies, glowering clouds and stormy outbursts. Jove’s evidently in a rage, despite his rejuvenating lust for the Theban king’s daughter, Semele. He’s not the only one: the first of many lightning-bolts – designed by Peter Mumford with Rick Fisher – that flash around Annemarie Woods’s crepusular set illuminate lonely Juno, spurned and seething spouse of the heavenly overlord. Her dogged quest for Read more ...
Robert Beale
Necessity has to be the mother of invention for many operatic enterprises these days – and there are few with such inventive powers as those of Clonter Opera in Cheshire.Its avowed aim is to be a platform for emerging artists and a bridge from conservatoire training to the professional world, and its track record in achieving that for nearly 50 years is impressive. This summer production in the theatre-on-the-farm brought 10 young singers together, bursting with talent, and entertained its audience well.It has to be inventive, of course. The pit in the Clonter theatre requires reduced Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Cotswold Line railway stations currently sport posters for Alex James’s “Big Feastival”, in which the ex-Blur bassist hosts a food-and-music jamboree on his cheese-making farm. Just up the road at Longborough Festival Opera, the crowd gathered on stage for the nuptials of Orfeo and Euridice would fit snugly in chez James as well.For Olivia Fuchs’s new production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, an arch wreathed in laurels presides over a chilled-out parade of casual summer wear, with glam accessories, as the rock-god singer finally gets to wed his beloved. An atmosphere of B-list villeggiatura, more Read more ...
Robert Beale
Bellini’s La Sonnambula is the highspot of a four-show lyric theatre bill at the Buxton International Festival this year, and demonstrates again how beautifully suited the small Matcham opera house in the High Peak is to mid-19th century bel canto repertoire.Given that the acoustics are so good, and what really matters is to get a good team of voices and a conductor of real musicianship in the pit – both of which they have here – it might have been tempting to skimp on the production values. Times are still tough when it comes to festival-style opera, and there are signs that in some aspects Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Smetana’s enchanting bitter-sweet comedy is probably on the danger-list for cancellation by the modern guardians of our moral sanctity. The plot hinges, like Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, on the cash-sale of the hero’s bride (in Hardy, the wife and daughter): not nice, and surely a risky hint to any young men in the audience teetering on the brink.And it has an anti-hero in the person of a youth with a stammer, who gets laughed at and ends up as a circus bear. The fact that the proposed sale is a trick to enable a genuine love match is the sort of detail that passes unnoticed in the Read more ...
David Nice
Not a good start. The tenor (Brian Jagde) walks downstage and sings loudly, if securely, to the audience: hardly a characterisation of an idealistic young Infante meditating on love. The next voice, the Page’s, is barely heard (Ella Taylor gets better). Then we have The Presence: Lise Davidsen, who you know is Elisabeth de Valois in the only carefree mode she’s to experience throughout the opera.Davidsen holds this otherwise rather tired, if well sung and scrupulously conducted, revival of Nicholas Hytner’s respectable production together. Yes, nearly all the figures in Verdi’s adaptation of Read more ...