Puccini
Gavin Dixon
Jonathan Kent’s Manon Lescaut is back for a first revival at Covent Garden. It’s a gaudy affair, and seems calculated to provoke. But there are some interesting ideas here, and the musical standards remain high, even from the lesser-known names of this second-run cast.Kent has taken on the laudable task of updating the opera, moving the action away from its 18th century setting to find contemporary resonances. But there are big problems: no one sends their daughters to convents any more, and all the elopements and sexual proclivities, while they might raise eyebrows today, wouldn’t shock in Read more ...
David Nice
What would Glyndebourne, staging Madama Butterfly for the first time, bring to Puccini's most heartbreaking tragedy? Subtle realism, perhaps? Certainly the composer, along with his superb librettists Giacosa and Illica, offers plenty of opportunities. Yet director Annilese Miskimmon botches nearly every significant moment, and it's surely her fault if her three principals are as wooden as the suggestion of lacquered trees dominating the sets.Vocally, at least, this was a respectable evening, occasionally a little more than that. Korean soprano Karah Son can fill high-lying phrases with Read more ...
graham.rickson
Just two thirds of Puccini’s Il Trittico still makes for an involving evening’s entertainment. Without Gianni Schicchi there’s an awful lot of misery and heartache, though director Michael Barker-Caven does manage to inject some black comedy into this revival of Il Tabarro, originally directed by David Pountney in 2004.Johan Engels’ minimalist set suggests that we’re watching a film noir, and the cast deserve much credit for managing not to slip and tumble while negotiating its expressionist contours. Ivan Inverardi’s Michele (pictured below right) even resembles a 1940s movie villain, down Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Boy meets girl; girl and boy fall in love; boy loses girl. In true bohemian fashion, La bohème can lay its operatic head anywhere from Paris to Peshawar, in any era from 90s punk to the Belle Epoque, and still make sense. What matters are the emotions; do we believe in the relationship between Rodolfo and Mimi, the camaraderie between Rodolfo and his friends? Stephen Barlow’s new production for Opera Holland Park may relocate the action rather unexpectedly, but what emerges both fresh and familiar is a love story between two people who couldn’t care less what city or what age they find Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Though composed after and based on a play by the same author, Puccini’s spaghetti western is in no way a sequel to Madama Butterfly, his whisky-sour eastern. Fanciulla is Butterfly’s opposite in almost every respect, and to tell the truth it isn’t much at home in a small theatre like the one at Grange Park. Where Butterfly is delicate and light-handed, its successor is loud and punch-drunk. Its heroine is no frail Puccini victim but a tough mother figure surprised by true love. Simpering geishas are replaced by rough gold-diggers, and mawkish tragedy by the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a beautiful moment at the start of Act II of Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly. Butterfly kneels, leaning forward to kiss Pinkerton, seated in his defiantly Western armchair. A paper screen moves swiftly across our view, and almost before it has passed he is gone, just another evanescent vision in this gorgeous, ephemeral world where cherry blossom no sooner flowers than it fades and falls.Now on its sixth revival, Minghella’s production has lost none of its visual appeal. Quick on its feet, thanks to sets that suggest rather than assert, swiftly reconfigured from moonlit grove to Read more ...
David Nice
From working-class hell via convent purgatory to Florentine comic heaven, the riches of Puccini's most comprehensive masterpiece seem inexhaustible. In a production as detailed in its balance between the stylised and the seemingly spontaneous as Richard Jones's, first seen in 2011, there are always going to be new connections between the three operas to discover. Some things are stronger, some weaker second time around, but you still come away convinced that each work glows best in its original context, and that none should be prised away.Two of the three leading ladies are new to the revival Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To say this latest revival of the Royal Opera’s Tosca peaks early would be an understatement. The shockwaves rippling out from the brass and timpani in the first few bars set the auditorium rumbling, tumbling the strings into motion. Conductor Emmanuel Villaume seizes his audience and refuses to let go, dragging us in to join the dance of the Sacristan’s sleekly self-satisfied music with its sacrilegious whiff of the Palm Court. To say the evening doesn’t get better than this is both to applaud such galvanising energy and orchestral character, and to say that it’s all downhill from here.The Read more ...
stephen.walsh
There’s a good deal to be said for semi-staged opera. It concentrates the mind in a particular way; it brings the orchestra more fully into the action; it moves the singers closer to the audience; and above all it reduces – even removes – the power of the director to superimpose some crackpot notion of his or her own on the dramaturgic design of the composer and librettist. Tosca, a work that in any case hardly lends itself to updating or relocation (though that hasn’t always stopped that happening), does on the other hand call for expert stage direction; and this is doubly the case with the Read more ...
David Nice
Kurt Cobain’s “Smells like Teen Spirit’ cued a realistic song and drink routine for Chekhov’s Three Sisters in a hit-and-miss update by director Benedict Andrews. This one, with a Puccini soundtrack unsupportively conducted by Xian Zhang, smells more like routine spirit with a couple of jolts along the way, a sludgy requiem for drug-fuelled twenty-somethings.Moving forward in time the action of Puccini’s inspiration, Henri Murger’s still fresh and authentic memories of bohemian youth in 1830s Paris, is more the rule than the exception now. The late Steven Pimlott did it with more infill at Read more ...
theartsdesk
September is upon us and it’s nearly time for the new season. English National Opera’s Artistic Director John Berry may have left the building but his enterprising legacy lives on in a 2015-16 season that looks on paper as good as any in the past 20 years; what happens after that is anyone's guess. Still, there shouldn’t be too much grief that ENO Music Director Edward Gardner has moved on, since his successor Mark Wigglesworth already has a fine track record with the company.Over at the Royal Opera, it’s business as usual with Antonio Pappano and at least one rarity to match Szymanowski’s Read more ...
David Nice
When is a famous aria more than just a showpiece? When it’s a narrative of a future event conjured by a hope beyond reason, which is what Madama Butterfly’s “Un bel dì” (“One fine day”) ought to be but so rarely is: too often prima donna overkill and stereotyped mannerisms get in the way. Not with Latvian soprano Kristine Opolais. Her Butterfly’s gestures can be stylised but always unusual, setting her apart, an ex-dancing geisha driven almost mad in a three-year wait for a “husband” who won’t come back. The effort of will sees her crumple in the aftermath of her vision.Opolais (pictured Read more ...