Bizet
Sam Marlowe
Wastwater is the deepest lake in England, overshadowed by rugged Cumbrian screes and described by Wordsworth as “long, stern and desolate”. In this new play by Simon Stephens, directed by Katie Mitchell, it becomes a central metaphor: terrors may lie beneath its dark, still surface, like the violence and secret suffering behind a suburban front door.The drama itself, though, takes place in quite different environs: the area around Heathrow Airport. Planes tear through the sky, symbolic of a modern restlessness and bargain travel that comes at a high cost to the future of our planet. And in a Read more ...
graham.rickson
“If you’re not careful, the opening act could become a costume parade: there are the townspeople, the children, the guards, the factory women – up to 350 people on stage in 20 minutes, before Carmen even enters, singing a catchy jingle from a recent TV advert.” So wrote director Daniel Kramer in last week’s Guardian. This may fill Carmen fans with nervous apprehension, but none should be felt, as this production is one of the most visually spectacular and exciting things I’ve seen.Not all the directorial decisions work equally well, but we’ll get to one of those later Read more ...
David Nice
Ditch the divers, the video-projected sea and the Relevance with a capital R of ENO's production last season - which managed all three very well indeed - and what remains of Bizet's Pearl Fishers in concert (and in French)? Three ravishing arias, three passionate duets, orchestration and harmony of a subtlety way beyond the plot's cod-oriental hokum: that's enough to begin with. Put Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano, master of exquisite colour and winged phrasing in French music, in charge of orchestra, chorus and two-and-a-half top singers, and you're in for a treat.Sweet delight Read more ...
David Nice
Which of the following has the thorniest dissonance: an early 18th-century dance-drama by Rebel, a symphony by Bizet, a concerto by Poulenc or a new work by South African composer Kevin Volans? If you think it's a trick question, you'll guess the right answer: the earliest. And which of the four sounds the least fresh and novel? My own take on that is the most recent. If Volans's Edinburgh International Festival commission had flashed up a few individual ideas, and a little more rehearsal time had been given to the Bizet, this would have been an evening of sheer delight from the SCO and its Read more ...
David Nice
To both paraphrase and contradict one of the many French critics who savaged young Bizet, his first stage work of genius mentions no fishers in its gawky libretto but offers strings of pearls in the music. That's to say, much more than the famous duet, the least moving number on offer last night. I’ve come to love this fitfully ravishing score’s gentle, intimate side but had given up on seeing a less than tawdry staging to solve the opera’s gimcrack orientalia. Yet here, with director Penny Woolcock steering a sensitive course between the devil of pure kitsch and the deep blue sea of over- Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It was well worth a dash down a rain-deluged Shaftesbury Avenue to catch this live digital broadcast from Milan at the Odeon, Covent Garden. For a start it meant saving a plane fare and a ticket at 250 euros or (much) more, and it also meant eavesdropping in vivid close-up on what may have been a nugget of history in the making at the grand old opera house.For his second gala opening since becoming La Scala's principal guest conductor, Daniel Barenboim couldn't go far wrong by picking Bizet's bomb-proof classic. By casting Georgian mezzo-soprano Anita Rachvelishvili in the title role, Read more ...