Opera
Le nozze di Figaro, Garsington Opera review - fine-tuned telling it as it isSaturday, 29 June 2024
“Tradition is sloppiness,” Mahler the opera conductor is credited with saying. But in the case of old master John Cox’s long-serving Garsington production of the greatest of operatic comedes, not if it’s refreshed with the subtlest insights in to... Read more... |
Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne review - every number a winner from dazzling revival castMonday, 24 June 2024
How much better can a classic get? Sebastian Scotney more or less asked the same question on theartsdesk the last time Giulio Cesare returned in triumph to Glyndebourne. I never saw David McVicar’s justly famous production of what has to be Handel’s... Read more... |
theartsdesk at Smetanova Litomyšl - three fascinating operas and a masterpiece superbly vindicatedSaturday, 22 June 2024
What did they put in the water of Czechia’s central Bohemia/Moravia borderlands? From south to north there's Mahler’s birthplace in Kalište and the city of his youth, Jihlava; the Polička tower where Martinů was born; and finally the Litomyšl... Read more... |
Il Trittico, Welsh National Opera review - another triumph for a hard-pressed companyMonday, 17 June 2024
It’s somehow typical of the Welsh National Opera I’ve known now for the best part of sixty years that it should confront its current funding difficulties with brilliant productions of two of the more challenging works in the repertory.The company’s... Read more... |
The Merry Widow, Glyndebourne review - fun and frolics in the EmbassyTuesday, 11 June 2024
Why would anyone want to stage a work like The Merry Widow in this day and age? Silly question. It’s the music, stupid. Of course, it’s an entertaining story and there are some good jokes. But I'd bet that if Heuberger had composed the music to this... Read more... |
Giulio Cesare, Blackwater Valley Opera Festival review - characterful, lustrous Handel on paradeTuesday, 04 June 2024
Recreating Handel’s Egypt with a first-rate cast on the summer opera scene could have been the exclusive domain of Glyndebourne, bringing back its revival of David McVicar’s celebrated Giulio Cesare in July. Yet over the Irish sea, in the grounds of... Read more... |
Tosca, Opera Holland Park review - passion and populismWednesday, 29 May 2024
Set in a tensely polarised Roman neighbourhood, with an election in the offing and radicals scrapping with reactionaries under poster-plastered walls, Stephen Barlow’s smart update of Tosca from 1800 to 1968 might have felt like a double dose of... Read more... |
Die Zauberflöte, Glyndebourne review - cornucopia of visual inventiveness eclipses everything elseMonday, 20 May 2024
Five years after it first clattered onto the Glyndebourne stage, André Barbe and Renaud Doucet’s visually exuberant Die Zauberflöte – featuring everything from dancing carcasses to a monster made out of blue-and-white crockery – continues to dazzle... Read more... |
Carmen, Glyndebourne review - total musical fusionFriday, 17 May 2024
It’s what you dream of in opera but don’t often get: singers feeling free and liberated to give their best after weeks of preparation with a master conductor. Glyndebourne Music Director Robin Ticciati leads the way with a peerless London... Read more... |
L'Olimpiade, Irish National Opera review - Vivaldi's long-distance run sustained by perfect teamworkMonday, 06 May 2024
In Vivaldi’s more extravagant operas, some of the arias can seem like a competition for the gold medal. L’Olimpiade is relatively modest in most of its demands, with one notable exception, and Irish National Opera’s track record in exemplary casting... Read more... |
Remembering conductor Andrew Davis (1944-2024)Saturday, 04 May 2024
As a human being of immense warmth, humour and erudition, Andrew Davis made it all too easy to forget what towering, incandescent performances he inspired. Now is a good time to recall those properly to mind, to listen to his huge discography, and... Read more... |
Götterdämmerung, LPO, Jurowski, RFH review - outside looking and listening in, always with fascinationSunday, 28 April 2024
Four years embracing pandemic, genocide and rapid environmental degradation predicted by Wagner’s grand myth have passed before the Southbank Brünnhilde could become a new woman – literally, in this Ring. Since Das Rheingold, the “preliminary... Read more... |
