Bizet
Gavin Dixon
After Calixto Bieito’s radical reimaging of Carmen, which opened at English National Opera this week, David McVicar’s version at Glyndebourne was bound to seem conservative. But it turned out to be a comparison of apples and Seville oranges: Bieito is certainly bolder, but McVicar is more sophisticated and digs deeper into the raw emotions of the work. It’s not a new production, but revival director Marie Lambert has kept it fresh, aided by a stunning cast and dynamic, energised conducting from Jakub Hrůša.McVicar sets his Carmen in the mid-to-late 19th century, a gentle updating that is most Read more ...
David Nice
Crotch-grabbing, suggestions of oral and anal sex, stylized punching and kicking and other casual violence offer diminishing returns in your standard Calixto Bieito production. Sometimes a scene or two flashes focused brilliance, which only makes you wonder why he doesn’t apply the same rigour throughout. His 17-year-old Carmen has more such fitful insights than most of his other shows, and they’re very much complemented here by assured conducting and singing to make this punchy edition of Bizet’s amazing score, shorn of most of its dialogue, flash past at an energetic and colourful pace in Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s only a few days since I was remarking, à propos the WNO revival, that Carmen usually survives its interpreters. Now WNO’s humble neighbour, Mid Wales Opera, are proving the same point, but in a more positive spirit, by touring a new production by Jonathan Miller, with a vastly reduced orchestra, a cast of fourteen including chorus, and a set (Nicky Shaw) made up of moveable stagings cleverly lit (by Declan Randall), like some highly simplified Chirico. Once again, Bizet comes through, not exactly enhanced, not always idiomatic, but as enjoyable as ever.The unexpected heroes of the show, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Popularity is all very well, but it can be a poisoned chalice. Braving the umpteenth revival of Carmen at WNO (original directors Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, revival director Caroline Chaney), I began to experience that sense of weariness that sometimes afflicts the dutiful end of the repertoire: Bizet’s masterpiece along with the relentless Butterflies and Toscas, the Figaros and Barbers. That feeling that the work and its myriad devotees will somehow get us through in the absence of anything resembling artistic necessity. And indeed Friday’s audience played its part, clapping at every Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Before curtain-up on the opening night of this revival of Penny Woolcock’s production of The Pearl Fishers, ENO's head of casting arrived on stage with a microphone. No doubt delightful company in person, he was an unwelcome sight here. Sophie Bevan had a stomach bug, he explained – the disappointment was palpable. But she'd be bravely singing anyway – grateful applause broke out. In the end, our goodwill was not called upon in the least, since Bevan's voice in her debut as Leïla was as strong and agile as ever.As the overture plays this production offers its most visually arresting moment, Read more ...
David Nice
Lovely singer, consummate pianist, shame about the programme. “Art song” is a rather prissy term, but we could have done with a few to ballast a diet of old pop – French chansons, Italian canzonettas, Spanish canciones, Victor Herbert tralala. Even a few substantial operatic arias with piano accompaniment made have made a difference. Not that Pretty Yende didn’t reveal her instinctive musicality and the lessons of her bel canto training in Milan at some point in every number, but an evening of encores is just too much for even the sweetest tooth.In fact it was one of the genuine encores which Read more ...
David Nice
Last year a DVD appeared featuring the 15 winning performances from the start of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition up to 2011. I watched them all, skimming if any seemed a notch below par but staying with most. You could see the star quality and the promise in many who have since become great artists, including Karita Mattila, Anja Harteros and Ekaterina Shcherbachenko. But only two seemed like the fully finished article from the start: Siberian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky in 1989 – the year Bryn Terfel won the Lieder prize – and American soprano Nicole Cabell in 2005, the Read more ...
David Nice
An orchestral musician recently told me that only one per cent of graduates from UK music colleges go on to take up a post in an established opera company or orchestra. You’d think, given such an alarming statistic, that there would be a lot of very good voices floating around trying to drum up work. Young talent is enterprisingly putting itself out there in a new wave of pub or site-specific fringe performances. I’ve shied away from pocket Verdi and Puccini stagings because I really wonder if those operas can take any but the most highly-trained, opulent voices; anything less is selling them Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
There was deliberate symbolism in the way Maria João Pires chose to make her first entrance onto the stage at the birthday gala of the Chapelle Musicale Reine Elisabeth in Brussels earlier this week. The concert was a grand occasion. A well-heeled, well-dressed audience replete with supporters of the 75-year-old music academy, plus some Belgian royalty, had filled the Palais des Beaux-Arts to capacity. The Portuguese pianist, a diminutive figure, tiptoed through the orchestra, just a couple of steps behind one of her young piano students - to turn the pages for him.This gesture of humility Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bizet: Symphony in C, Jeux d’enfants, Variations chromatiques San Francisco Ballet Orchestra/Martin West (Reference Recordings)Bizet’s only symphony was composed in 1855 as a school exercise. The 17-year-old composer promptly forgot about the piece, and the manuscript was spotted in the archives of the Paris Consevatoire some 80 years later, receiving a belated premiere in 1935. George Balanchine turned it into an abstract ballet in 1947, and the symphony is most often heard in this context. So it makes perfect sense for a crack ballet orchestra to record the work and Martin West’s San Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Bizet’s Les pêcheurs de perles is an unfashionably generous indulgence of a score tethered to an unfashionable and unredeemable plot. There’s not a contemporary director alive who can make the wretched thing work, so perhaps it would be better if we all just accepted this and closed our eyes through a Covent Garden revival from the 1980s with some of the finest voices in the business. It certainly gives everything to singers and orchestra that it so cruelly takes away from any director, but sadly the opera’s own faults do tend to end up at the door of those who attempt it anyway.Opera Holland Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
We had already been reassured in interviews that Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen would not be shocking, although perhaps this was more a warning to those of us hoping that it might be. Bieito’s radical reputation is well earned, although approaching 50 he is by no means an enfant and clearly not so terrible anymore either.The first scene opens with a soldier wearing nothing but Y-fronts and boots, holding a rifle and running round the stage, presumably as a punishment handed out by Corporal Moralès or Lieutenant Zuniga. In fact, there are bits and bobs of undressing at various stages of Read more ...