Opera
Peter Quantrill
What happens on the stage of Stockhausen’s first opera would fill a book – quite a bad novel – but the plot is simple enough. Michael grows up with a domineering, game-hunting father and mentally unstable mother; discovers sex; passes his exams; travels the globe and finds his calling in life as a visionary and saviour.Premiered in 1981 and last seen in London in 1985, this skimpily veiled autobiography launched a cycle of seven music dramas, one for every day of the week and each of them reinventing from scratch what we think of as opera. The brassy Greeting in the foyer of the Royal Read more ...
Maxime Pascal
Stockhausen stands alongside Monteverdi and Beethoven as a composer who exploded the understanding of his art. Stockhausen deeply changed the relationship between space, time and music; there’s a human, intimate dimension to his composition, and he predicted the future. If Edgar Varèse anticipated the invention of electronic sound, then Stockhausen imagined a theatre of the future, combining electronics with the metamorphosis of the space and the circulation of sound in the concert hall to explore questions of acoustic properties that much newer forms of technology are still probing today. Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
Mid-career, moving ever further away from composing for concert platform and church towards the stage, Berlioz found himself unsure where his take on Faust belonged. In the end he hedged his bets and titled it a "dramatic legend". Staging it as an opera, as he really wanted, requires the work of a theatrical plastic surgeon. Connective tissue is needed to flesh out the story, to join the four limbs of the work and stitch together its self-contained archetypes of 19th-century music drama: military march, ballet, drinking chorus, archaic ballad and so on.To raise the curtain on Glyndebourne Read more ...
David Nice
Leaving a revival performance of Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur, a friend asked Hans Werner Henze, also in the audience, that dreaded question: "what did you think?" "Very competent and extremely well performed," came the answer. What snap judgment can one form about Phaedra, his own late mythological fantasia, which also features a bass as the half-man, half-bull, but keeps its labyrinth – in this production, at any rate – to the music and the bizarre wraps around the story of Phaedra's passion for her stepson Hippolytus? Extremely well sung and played by superb young artists, jury out Read more ...
David Nice
Louise Alder, lyric soprano of the moment and vivacity incarnate, had yet to be born when John Eliot Gardiner made his first recording of Handel's Semele with the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in 1981. Now they all come together to prove that when it hits the music-theatre heights in Act 3, the first great English-language opera in all but name, premiered 275 years ago, could have been written yesterday. "Sexy," as the advance publicity claimed, it is not, but there's plenty of sensuous music as mortal Semele basks in Jupiter's love, and intense drama as she goes too far in Read more ...
Robert Beale
Opera North created something approaching a new art form when they performed Wagner’s Ring in "concert stagings", putting their large orchestra in full view, with singers symbolically dressed and given limited front-of-stage space, and a continuous projected screen backdrop. That approach was also used for their Turandot two years ago, and now method and team are reunited as Sir Richard Armstrong conducts Aida with Annabel Arden as director and design by Joanna Parker.The positives are considerable. Gone are conventional stage effects; instead, the performance is aurally stunning, with a Read more ...
Annabel Arden
This will be the latest in Opera North’s acclaimed concert stagings of large-scale works, which have previously included Wagner’s Ring cycle, Puccini’s Turandot and Strauss’s Salome. For Verdi’s Egyptian epic, we’ve recreated the team which brought Turandot to the concert stage, including myself as director, Sir Richard Armstrong as conductor, and designer Joanna Parker, who will be looking after all the visual aspects.I find it exciting to treat iconic works like this because the performances offer a new way to experience classic opera. When you get rid of the proscenium arch, you feel very Read more ...
David Nice
On one level, it's about Biblically informed good and evil at sea, in both the literal and the metaphorical sense. On another, the love that dared not speak its name when Britten and E M Forster adapted Hermann Melville's novella is either repressed or (putatively) liberated. The conflicts can make for lacerating music theatre, as they did in Orpha Phelan's production for Opera North. Deborah Warner's ideas are there, but yet confused, to the Royal Opera House audience at least, even after runs in Madrid and Rome. In the bows of the ship, Ivor Bolton's conducting is mostly solid, no more, Read more ...
David Nice
While Bach's and Handel's Passions have been driving thousands to contemplate suffering, mortality and grace, this elegy for black lives lost over a century ago also chimes movingly with pre-Easter offerings. First seen in Southampton last year as a commission by 14-18-NOW marking the centenary of the First World War, it relives through song, dance and word the fate of the 618 men of the South African Native Labour Corps who drowned in the English channel when their ship, the SS Mendi, collided with a much larger vessel in thick fog.The very fact that few of us will not even have heard the Read more ...
David Nice
Goethe's cosmic Faust becomes Gounod's operatic fust in what, somewhat surprisingly, remains a repertoire staple. You go for the tunes, hoping for the world-class voices to do them justice and prepared for a pallid quarter-of-an-hour or two. David McVicar's 15-year-old production as revived by Bruno Ravella is beginning to date, Royal Opera trad with a few scandalous add-ons and wacky choreography by Michael Keegan-Dolan. Two things are startling this time round: the conducting of Dan Ettinger, which makes the score sound much more interesting than I remember, and a phenomenon, unique to Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
For the final, and only UK, date of his Vinci Arias tour, virtuoso countertenor Franco Fagioli gave an animated and arresting recital of baroque arias at Birmingham Town Hall on Sunday afternoon with the Italian period instrument group Il pomo d’oro. The programme’s premise was to shine a light not only on the music of one of today’s best-known baroque composers - Handel - but also some of his contemporaries, examining how the composers’ relationships and rivalries with one another inspired and affected each their writing. Directed from the violin by concertmaster Zefira Valova, Il Pomo Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music’s spring opera is a theatrical triumph and musically very, very good. It’s 27 years since they last presented what Vaughan Williams called his "morality" – that was a triumph too, and they made a CD of it which I still have. They may not be issuing a sound recording this time, but as an experience in the theatre, it is even more compelling.The quality of the solo performances and of the choral singing is extraordinary. The RNCM clearly has some outstanding young men studying in its vocal faculty these days, and had the opportunity to cast from strength. In Read more ...