Puccini
David Nice
Emotional truth backed up by musical sophistication is what saves Puccini’s drama about a geisha deserted by an American officer from mawkishness. Director Daisy Evans has a very good idea for getting at its palpitating heart in a production of stunning visual beauty; Celine Byrne in the title role gives us vocal opulence but not nearly enough identification with a woman whose total, misplaced love leads to painful hope and desperate tragedy.A student who was at a Dublin discussion with Evans told me her essential concept, and I thought it sounded promising: at Pinkerton’s funeral many years Read more ...
Robert Beale
Phyllida Lloyd’s production of La Bohème for Opera North is over 32 years old but still feels young. And for its audiences it still has the ability to capture – as the opera is designed to – the experience of youthful love and separation, its ecstasy and its heartbreak.It's set in the 1950s or early 1960s, rather than the 19th century. But in some respects it takes its cue from the stories that Puccini and his collaborators used as their source material, Henry Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème, and the format they created from them. What we see are literally scenes – tableaux – with Read more ...
David Nice
Forget Anna Netrebko, if you ever gave the Russian Scarpia’s former cultural ambassador much thought (theartsdesk wouldn’t). It should be uphill from now on as Aleksandra Kurzak takes over the role of a diva out of her depth. Last night, though, she was unwell, and the role was taken by Ailyn Pérez, a lyric soprano who knows how to pull out all the right stops and whose dramatic truth complemented Oliver Mears’ production to perfection, presumably on little rehearsal time.Mears plays mostly by the Puccini/Giacosa/Illica rulebook of love and terror in totalitarian Rome - foolish the director Read more ...
stephen.walsh
So it’s come to this: WNO’s autumn season reduced to two operas, a Tosca borrowed from Opera North and a revival of their own Candide from two years back; then two next spring. a revival of their Valleys saga Blaze of Glory (about mine closures and singers who won’t give up) and a new Flying Dutchman. And – wait for it – Tosca is with a reduced orchestra, not because some bright spark has decided to freshen it up, modernise it, but for a simpler, more compelling reason: there is no money.What can a great company placed in this position by idiot, philistine apparatchiks do? Well, Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
At first, I had my doubts about Puccini’s Suor Angelica in this concert performance at the Proms with Sir Antonio Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra.With the big band (up to and including Richard Gowers’s organ) arrayed far behind the conductor, the singers marshalled in a line in front, and the extensive ranks of the London Symphony Chorus and Tiffin Boys’ Choir rising on all sides, the Royal Albert Hall seemed to have turned Puccini’s late (1918) chamber opera – the detached final third of his portmanteau trilogy Il Trittico – into the form that this venue once loved best of all: an Read more ...
Robert Beale
At first sight, it seemed that Clonter Opera’s decision to tackle Tosca this year might be a leap too far. Its once-a-year complete production, dedicated to nurturing emerging talent in the security of the Cheshire countryside, must always be an essay in miniaturization, and a singing cast of six and an orchestra of 12 might seem hopelessly small for Puccini’s grand passions and shuddering shocks.In the end, it was a happy surprise that so much of beauty and musical integrity emerged from the exercise – and that the production by Steve Elias brought a convincing fresh interpretation to the Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
Before Luigi Illica wrote the libretti for Puccini’s Tosca and Madama Butterfly, he had joined the composer as the librettist in a race to stage the first production of La Bohème. The race was against Ruggero Leoncavallo, a composer Illica had once collaborated with on a libretto – for Puccini, his Manon Lescaut.In the snakepit of the Milanese opera business in the late 1800s, these tangled connections were standard, as dozens of young composers fought for prominence to be the new Verdi, whose portrait hangs on Leoncavallo's wall. That there would be rival productions based on Henri Read more ...
David Nice
So here in Paris, as at Salzburg in 2022, it’s no longer “Puccini’s Trittico” but “the Asmik Grigorian Trittico 3-1-2”. Which would be a very bad idea if she were a lazy diva like Anna Netrebko. But Grigorian works selflessly within wonderfully strong casts. In league with Christof Loy’s viscerally demanding productions and Carlo Rizzi’s infinitely sympathetic conducting, she sets the seal on one of the greatest operatic events I’ve ever experienced.In recent years, having returned to the three masterpieces – in their totality probably Puccini’s supreme offering – in Zoom classes, I’ve found Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
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 voluptuous femme fatale of a score dressed up in a shy smile and a coy over-the-shoulder glance of a plot: pure musical emotion in search of a dramatic outlet. No wonder Merchant and Ivory found the soundtrack for A Room With A View’s unspoken yearnings and repressed passions in its “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta”.If repression is in Antonio Pappano’s Read more ...
stephen.walsh
This revival of Puccini’s Trittico a mere three and a half months after it was first shown on the Millennium Centre stage seems to bear witness to WNO’s current financial uncertainty. In effect, it reduces their 2024 repertory to half what it was a decade ago – four shows instead of eight, though admittedly all four productions have been new, at least to this company. The problem was also to some extent compounded by the number of empty seats at Sunday’s first night. For most Bohème-lovers, no doubt, one Trittico a year might seem plenty. But there they will have been mistaken, not just Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini elevated the operatic tearjerker to tragic status in three masterpieces: La bohème, Madama Butterfly and Suor Angelica, rivalling the other two in intensity despite its brevity. Its special atmosphere works best as the central part of a trilogy (Il Trittico) between a dark melodrama and a pacy comedy. The jury’s still out on whether it works on its own, so disappointingly undernourished is Annilese Miskimmon’s production.For a start, Puccini’s delicate evocation of a cloister towards sunset in springtime, with crepuscular birdsong, doesn’t tally with the grim picture of pregnant girls Read more ...
Robert Beale
For 50 years Clonter Opera, the song-on-the-farm project in rural Cheshire, has been encouraging would-be opera stars by giving them a chance to perform in undemanding conditions under the guidance of experienced professional.It all began with audiences sitting on straw bales in a barn, and only after a purpose-built theatre came into being was there a small pit enabling something more than piano accompaniment for major productions.To celebrate the anniversary, they’ve done something very different from the more-or-less complete opera productions that were often a highlight of high summer in Read more ...