ENO
alexandra.coghlan
For all its comic fantasy and lilting tunes, there’s nothing pastel-coloured about Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann. Deaths are frequent and bloody, humour is macabre, and emotions run high – being late to the pub is cause enough for violence and conspiracy theories. It’s a world of sliding screens, where a smile always threatens to become a leer, a kiss a murder. Who better (who else?) to inhabit this operatic fantasy-land than Richard Jones, a director who relishes the elision and collision of kitsch and the grotesque. His steel-capped whimsy here hits its mark with deadly and delicious Read more ...
David Benedict
As in sex, so it is in music: there’s a lot riding on the climax. The celebrated third act trio of Der Rosenkavalier is arguably the most famous orgasm in music – dear reader, can you name a better one? – but time it wrongly and you’ll regret it. There is, however, absolutely nothing regrettable about this A-list cast in the hands of director David McVicar and conductor Edward Gardner. Theirs is the most assured, most riveting Rosenkavalier in this country for years.Lush, plush and dangerous to know though Strauss’s score is, many directors shy away from the opera for the simple reason that Read more ...
David Nice
Two precisely imagined dream-visions bookend a cornucopia on the musical front. I’ll start with the deadly but save the apparently frivolous for the top slot. Christopher Alden’s pitiless exiling of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream from Elizabethan wood to 1960s school block was to opera what Lars von Trier’s Melancholia was to film: audience-sundering, often alienating, sometimes enticing, but very much its own consistent world. Its splendid cast and conductor Leo Hussain worked as one to enhance the paradoxes of its terrible beauty.ENO’s newcomer on the schoolboy front, Nico Muhly’s Two Read more ...
josh.spero
While I'm still learning to disentangle my mezzo from my Meistersinger, I enjoyed a lot of the opera on offer in London this year, especially at English National Opera. Parsifal was perfect and Rameau's Castor and Pollux, while probably a little too Germanic in direction with its dancing amputated legs and unerotic nudity, was wonderfully sung. I especially enjoyed the premiere of Nico Muhly's Two Boys, whose internet-era set design suited its perverse modern "love" story. The first chorus, which built up comprehensible layers into a modem's hum, was genius.On the art front, Egon Schiele's Read more ...
aleks.sierz
At its best, theatre is enthralling, and this year's offerings were led by one brilliant musical and one amazing comedy. With the West End immune to the chills of the recession, its profits went up, and it warmly welcomed a couple of hits from the subsidised sector: enter Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly’s Matilda, a gorgeous RSC musical, plus Richard Bean’s hilarious One Man Two Guvnors from the National. And then Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem (pictured above) returned for yet another must-see run to become the signature play of our times. All of these sent you out into the night feeling better Read more ...
David Nice
Who is more likely to be an operatic creature of flesh and blood: Puccini's young diva, unexpectedly caught up in the infernal machine of a lustful tyrant, or Tchaikovsky's teenager impetuously pouring out her soul in a love letter to a man she's just fallen for? Usually, you'd go for Tatyana over Tosca every time. At ENO it's currently the other way round. While Deborah Warner's new production of Eugene Onegin unfathomably misses most of the truths in a story we can all identify with, Catherine Malfitano's take on the best if most overdone Italian operatic thriller in the repertoire makes Read more ...
David Nice
What’s not to love about Tchaikovsky’s candid, lyric scenes drawn from Pushkin’s masterly verse novel? ENO’s advance publicity summed it up neatly by promising “lost love, tragedy, regret”. We’ve most of us been there. That does mean that truthfulness to life can count for even more in a performance than good singing. Both burned their way through Dmitri Tcherniakov’s radical Bolshoi rethink, but while there are four fine voices to help Deborah Warner’s surprisingly traditional production along, the truth flickers very faintly here.Warner updates the action, but by less than a century: Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The English National Opera were taking quite a gamble with last night's Rameau premiere. The daunting basics? A 250-year-old French opera that hasn't yet been properly adopted by its homeland, let alone by Britain; a mildly autistic mythological plot that eulogises the ordered loyalties of brotherly love over the messy complications of sexual desire; and a director, Barrie Kosky, Intendant at Berlin's Komische Oper, where you're not really allowed to break wind without the help of a dramaturg.Katrin Lea Tag's minimalist set took the gamble one step further. From start to finish, the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Fiona Shaw's new production of The Marriage of Figaro for the ENO focuses on the theme of entrapment. Her first victim? A noisy bee. Don Basilio finds himself so harassed by its buzzing, he confines it to the body of a harpsichord. Magically, a few seconds later, the low hum reappears - on strings and bassoons.It's classic Shaw: a clever, symbolic, funny and possibly superfluous bit of theatrical punnery. She doesn't overdo the anomie. The political and class dimensions are but lightly touched upon. But there is certainly a nasty tension to the Almaviva household. Were they as upset about the Read more ...
fisun.guner
A 50th birthday is a landmark occasion. One has plenty to look back on, whilst still having much to look forward to. Plus there’s all that life experience to draw on. What’s not to feel positive about? In the case of a gallery that’s built up a remarkable reputation as an innovative space for contemporary art outside London, sheer staying power is surely to be cheered and celebrated – "hear hear" for the next 50 years, and so forth.But it’s also worth asking whether middle age hasn’t precipitated some kind of quiet crisis for Bristol's Arnolfini gallery. It’s not fair, of course, to judge on Read more ...
David Nice
No two creative artists have a stronger right to make a valid statement about Auschwitz than a Polish-born composer who escaped his family's fate by fleeing to Russia, only to fall into another anti-Semitic trap, and a Polish writer whose clear-eyed transmutation of her three years in the camp inspired the opera. Neither, of course, guarantees the end result of great art. But Mieczysław Weinberg, Shostakovich's dearest disciple who died in 1996 without having seen his most cherished project staged, and novelist Zofia Posmysz, an elegant 88-year-old who having attended the Bregenz Festival Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“An elixir with a kick, sir, one that really packs a punch”, sings Adina in Jonathan Miller’s Midwestern The Elixir of Love, and she couldn’t be more right. A night spent among the floral prints, perky ponytails and pastel wipe-down surfaces of this production is like being battered around the head with a bouquet of roses wielded by Doris Day. Frame the encounter in a Hopper-inspired set from which all traces of menace have been expunged – no nighthawks dare lurk in bustling Adina’s Diner – and you have the perfect operatic antidote (more effective than any of Dulcamara’s potions) to the Read more ...