Puccini
alexandra.coghlan
With opera houses in Britain now ringing to the four-letter cries of Anna Nicole and Two Boys (not to mention the rather more elderly, but no less explicit utterances of Le grand macabre) verbal taboos it seems are a thing of the past. Yet one word remains tainted, perpetually and immutably filthy, never to be voiced in polite cultural company: operetta. Whether or not Puccini’s La rondine actually falls into this genre is debatable, but like the heroine at its heart we shouldn’t allow this silken embrace of a work to be tarnished by a label, however obscene.If you were seized unawares by the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Directors of Madama Butterfly are spoilt for choice when it comes to visual imagery. At their disposal are the vast aesthetic resources of at least one, or, if they're clever, two great cultural superpowers. Thus, Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier's Ikea-raid from 2003 (quite unbelievably returning to the Royal Opera House last night for a fourth time) isn't so much disappointing as criminally negligent. As the dozen or so identikit Japanese blinds (I'll give them £2.50 for the lot) lower their white screens to the sound of their own electronic humming chorus on Pinkerton's arrival in Nagasaki Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Tosca-at-Covent-Garden is a commodity, like bacon-for-breakfast - a pricier commodity, to be true, at officially up to £229.50 a seat, but in both cases people want to get what they expect. For the final performances next month in this summer revival, with the megastars Angela Gheorghiu, Jonas Kaufmann and Bryn Terfel, all seats are sold, with touts on eBay offering a pair of amphitheatre seats at bids over £300. Clearly Tosca ain’t art so much as the Royal Opera House's ATM, and therefore I have to suspend my disappointment as an opera lover in the opening of the run last night, with a Read more ...
stephen.walsh
No point in going to WNO’s Turandot expecting to see images of old Beijing, for all the charming lady in a Chinese floral hat on the programme cover. The curtain goes up on the inside of an enormous galvanised dustbin festooned with photos of what might be lads from the football team but are actually Turandot’s victims to date. Calaf is a vagrant, Turandot a blue-suited Rosa Klebb, Ping, Pang and Pong fascisti bureaucrats in coloured suits, the “Popolo di Pekino” (both sexes) shirted and tied office workers, and so forth. Perfumes of the East? Forget it. This is Beijing Mussolini-style.Like Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Be different - take a festival break in Europe instead of the UK, and catch a different landscape. While artists in both new music and classical are constantly circling the world in search of more picturesque settings, you can find your alternative Glasto in Denmark or Belgium, or you can find favourite chamber musicians in Austria rather than London. theartsdesk brings you listings of this year's major European festivals: rock in Sonar, Sziget and Stradbally, opera in Bayreuth, Verona and Salzburg, dance in Vienna, Epidauros and Spoleto, visual arts in Istanbul, Zurich and Avignon. This Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Contemporary music and 11 new productions are at the heart of a strong ENO 2011-12 season announced today. Highlights include a new opera from Damon Albarn (Doctor Dee) on the extraordinary life of Elizabethan alchemist and intellectual John Dee, the UK premiere of Detlev Glanert's Caligula, Wolfgang Rihm's chamber opera (which will open at the Hampstead Theatre) Jakob Lenz and the first Coliseum staging of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, "the most controversial opera of the past 50 years", according to artistic director John Berry.Contemporary music and Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Debuting last February at the height of the economic crisis, Jonathan Miller’s freshly minted Bohème was a timely operatic glance in the social mirror. Almost two years on, and the hardships of his young Bohemians seem no less apt. With fiscal collapse so conveniently on the horizon, a lesser director might have succumbed and offered up a “relevant” contemporary treatment. It is to Miller’s credit (and one in the eye to those critics who so routinely deplore his smugness) that he not only avoided this dramatic dead end, but eschewed the self-conscious cleverness of Così or Rigoletto, instead Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Melody Moore is well named. Her parents must have had a sixth sense that she would be "melodious". This exciting young American soprano has been making waves on both sides of the Atlantic. She has established footholds at both San Francisco and Los Angeles Opera and in the 2008/9 season made her English National Opera debut in Jonathan Miller's new production of La bohème. She returns to the ENO this season as Marguerite in Des McAnuff's new staging of Gounod's Faust, a role which seems to define the direction in which her voice and career are taking her.
Hers is a lyric voice with Read more ...
william.ward
Golfing for Cats: Alan Coren once invented the perfect book title on the basis that if you combined those who follow the activities of Tiger Woods with those who adore smaller domestic felines, you have a massive demographic primed to buy your last tome. Likewise for TV commissioning editors, there must be something tempting about the high-concept hybrid. As part of a season designed to interest the Great British audience in the arcane delights of the operatic tradition (which other shows in the series remind us was born in Italy), what better way to sugar the pill than to stick a much- Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Rarely have I seen an opera where so much of the activity, so much of the detailed business of relating, loving, falling out and hating, has rung so true for so much of the time. And never do I remember this truthfulness coming from such simplicity. For, in terms of set, costume and conception, this is a very ordinary, recognisable, dependable, 19th-century Tosca. But what soprano-cum-director Catherine Malfitano (once a star Tosca herself) does with these familiar ingredients is quite extraordinary.We don't have to wait long for the first sign that Malfitano's handling of the drama will be Read more ...
edward.seckerson
She was the Tosca who played live to an audience of one billion in 107 countries; she is the director of English National Opera's new staging of the opera they once dubbed Puccini's "shabby little shocker". How times change. In this exclusive ENO podcast, Catherine Malfitano says that it's high time we moved on from the Tosca-as-diva portrayal - that, she says, should remain offstage where Puccini left it.
She talks about the games she plays with her young performers to find a deeper truth and how she draws daily upon the fruits of a glorious career spanning 30-plus years in over 70 roles. Read more ...