Opera
La voix humaine, Grange Park Opera online review – hanging on the telephoneFriday, 05 June 2020
Rustles of renewal are stirring in the Surrey woods where Grange Park Opera has built the splendid theatre that remains, for this summer, sadly out of bounds. Faced with the cancellation of its 2020 programme, Wasfi Kani’s company has not simply... Read more... |
Classical Music/Opera direct to home 12 - partying at a distanceFriday, 22 May 2020
What would have been the festival season starts around now. Some organisations are offering mementos of past glories; others, especially in countries where the lockdown has been relaxed to a greater extent than is possible in the UK, are managing to... Read more... |
The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, Dutch National Opera, OperaVision review - fairy-tale good and evil made realThursday, 21 May 2020
How do you render pure goodness interesting? Unorthodox director Dmitri Tcherniakov and radiant young soprano Svetlana Ignatovich make us smile and break our hearts with their take on the maiden Fevroniya: living at one with nature, seeing God in... Read more... |
Avoiding meltdown from lockdown: Michael Chance on The Grange Festival's strategy for survivalWednesday, 20 May 2020
Where to start? We at The Grange Festival began in mid-March (the 15th) with a letter to our company, all those few hundred who come and work for us during the festival months and who are all, almost without exception, employed on a freelance basis... Read more... |
Sadko, Bolshoi Opera online review - medieval Russia meets reality TVTuesday, 12 May 2020
Russia came late to the coronavirus lockdown, and will be leaving early – this evening Vladimir Putin announced that national measures were coming to an end, though the disease still rages there. The country’s theatres were quick into action... Read more... |
Eugene Onegin, Komische Oper, OperaVision review - sensual and devastatingSaturday, 09 May 2020
Liberated from Pushkin’s salons, ballrooms and bedrooms, Barrie Kosky’s Eugene Onegin bursts out into nature. Tatyana and Olga lounge in the long grass stealing heavy fingerfuls of jam straight from the jar; party-guests run through the trees with... Read more... |
Metropolitan Opera At-Home Gala livestream review - classy joy and sorrow in domestic settingsMonday, 27 April 2020
So many of the world's great opera singers inviting us to look through the keyhole at a carefully presented version of their lockdown lives over four very variable hours, such bad sound for the most part (Skype, like Zoom, catches the voice but... Read more... |
Classical Music/Opera direct to home 8 - from troubled royal rituals to a lone cellistFriday, 24 April 2020
Inventiveness waxes ever stronger, it seems, in quarantine, as do the number of faces and instrumental sounds gathered together at any one time. As the branches diversify, embracing pre-filmed concert and opera, solo and multiple livestreams from... Read more... |
Elektra/Der Rosenkavalier, Nightly Met Opera Streams review - searing hits and indulgent missesWednesday, 22 April 2020
A brutal Greek tragedy and a rococo Viennese comedy, both filtered through the eyes and ears of 20th century genius: what a feast on consecutive nights from the Metropolitan Opera's recent archive. There's been real thought behind the wealth of... Read more... |
Classical Music/Opera direct to home 6 - Parsifals for EasterFriday, 10 April 2020
Wagner's final drama, of learning, suffering and redemption through compassion, is second only to Bach's Passions at this time of year, and seems likely to strike a special note in the present crisis. Opera companies around the world, making much in... Read more... |
The Rake's Progress, Complicité online review - well-projected journey from pastoral to madhouseWednesday, 08 April 2020
One way to look at Stravinsky's celebrated collaboration with W H Auden and Chester Kallman is as a numbers opera in nine pictures, four of them indebted to Hogarth's series of paintings/prints. So it's not surprising that visual flair has marked... Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Opera North, OperaVision review - claustrophobic visions of terror and beautyFriday, 03 April 2020
Feeling stir-crazy right now? Imagine being confined to one room with a half-crazed housekeeper, two dysfunctional kids and two increasingly insistent ghosts, plagued by nightmares, unable even to get out into the garden or walk down to the lake.... Read more... |
