ENO
theartsdesk
English National Opera’s 2010-11 season includes 10 new productions, including ENO premieres of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia and Handel’s Radamisto. There will be two new contemporary operas for the main stage: the world premiere of a new opera by Nico Muhly and the UK premiere of A Dog’s Heart by Alexander Raskatov. ENO directing debuts will be made by Benedict Andrews (The Return of Ulysses), Mike Figgis (Lucrezia Borgia), Terry Gilliam (The Damnation of Faust), Des McAnuff (Faust), Simon McBurney (A Dog’s Heart), Rufus Norris (Don Giovanni), Bartlett Sher (new Nico Muhly opera) and Dmitri Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Fiona Shaw talks about the not inconsiderable demands of juggling Restoration comedy with German Expressionism. It almost doesn’t bear thinking about. Between shows at the National Theatre, where she’s been delighting audiences with her rollocking Lady Gay Spanker in London Assurance, she enthuses about her second foray into the challenging business of directing opera: Hans Werner Henze’s early gem Elegy for Young Lovers for English National Opera at the Young Vic. She enlightens us about this strange, dream-like opera-play, about the not-so-delicate balance of being a working actor and Read more ...
David Nice
It's amazing how much you can tell of what lies ahead from the way a conductor handles a master composer's first chord. Katya Kabanova's opening sigh of muted violas and cellos underpinned by double basses should tell us that the Volga into which the self-persecuted heroine will eventually throw herself is a river, real or metaphorical, of infinite breadth and depth. And that was exactly what Mark Wigglesworth conjured from ENO strings in a performance more alert to the value of every note and colour in Janáček's lightning-flash score than any I've heard. David Alden's production and a Read more ...
edward.seckerson
On the eve of his brand-new staging of Janáček's Katya Kabanova for English National Opera, David Alden - the one-time "bad boy" of opera - talks about first-night riots, Britten and Donizetti triumphs, and the dramatic potency of Janáček. Live and uncut.
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David Nice
Britain's most communicative singing actor, lyric-dramatic tenor Philip Langridge has died at the age of 70. I offer a personal reminiscence, looking back on some of the greatest theatrical experiences of my life, and ask conductors Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Sir Mark Elder, Edward Gardner and Vladimir Jurowski as well as director Richard Jones what Langridge's example has meant to them. List your top ten operatic performances: it's an exercise some critics are asked to undertake by rating-hungry newspapers, and a task many of us like to indulge in simply to remind ourselves what's truly Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It has always been a cornerstone of my personal philosophy that beauty and insight can be found in the very lowest of common denominators. That Big Brother, Friends, Love It magazine or Paris Hilton provide revelations about life that are of as much consequence, of as much wonder, as any offered up by the classic pantheon. That that which the people respond to must and usually does have plenty of merit lurking within it. And so I have always held out hope that Philip Glass, the most popular of living classical composers, is actually quite good, somehow, somewhere. But, actually, he really isn Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
It takes roughly, ooh, about five minutes for Jonathan Miller's new production of Donizetti's The Elixir of Love (whose 1950s set had the audience gawping smilingly within seconds) to start electrifying the nerve-endings into orgasmic spasm. With one sexy shake of her hips, Sarah Tynan's immeasurably winning blonde-bobbed Adina, a Marilyn Monroe-like tease, the till-girl and owner of a Midwest diner and filling station, which rotates - almost as stunningly as Tynan - amid the nothingness of desert and sky, clutches a mop and swings this music and its troop of jiving dotted quavers into a Read more ...
David Nice
Is Donizetti's fustian operatic mash-up of Sir Walter Scott worth staging seriously? On CD, stupenda Sutherland and divina Callas continue to give us goosebumps with their darting, florid stabs at poor mad Lucia. If the difficult-to-achieve match of bel canto and dramatic intensity rests only with the lead tenor, as it did last night, what's left? Well, this revival of David Alden's 2008 production still looks stunning, well in line with ENO's high visual style so far this season. The expressionist mania bursting out of those sets and costumes, though, can't often be supported by a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“Don’t look down,” comes the exhortation from somewhere on the floor. "Look ahead." I am testing out a new bit of kit, a large wooden cylinder encased in a metal frame, suspended via ropes and pulleys from a high ceiling. The diameter is big enough for me to be able to stand up and walk. Or not. The inclination is to watch your feet as, like a hamster, you power the rotation of the drum. Trouble is if you look down you lose your balance. So I look ahead and take grandmother’s footsteps which are barely strong enough to get the thing moving at all. "Take bigger strides," comes more advice. But Read more ...
theartsdesk
No great new movements or radically transformational figures emerged to dominate classical music in the Noughties (not even him up there). Just one small nagging question bedevilled us: will the art form survive? Well, it has. What appeared to be a late 20th-century decline in audience interest in the classical tradition was in fact a consumer weariness with the choices on offer. And who could blame them? At the start of this decade, the London orchestral scene, in the hands of aging, mediocre conductors, was as appealing as a boil-in-the-bag fish dinner; administratively and Read more ...
David Nice
Love it or loathe it, the powerhouse effect is back at English National Opera. The era which gave its name to the sobriquet, that challenging time in the 1980s and early 1990s when Davids Pountney, Alden and Fielding skewed the stage and Mark Elder matched their vision in the pit, now has an equal. The ENO calendar year has just ended with Rupert Goold's Chinese restaurant shake-up of a Turandot , everything we saw beautifully thought out and focused to knife-edge brilliance, and every sound emanating from the ENO Orchestra and Chorus under Ed Gardner sensual-perfect. Alas, the kind of Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
There are so many ways a dramatic production of Messiah can go wrong it is almost unbearable to think about it. Certainly, there was a palpable buzz of nervousness in the Coliseum about last night’s audience as they took their seats. Did English National Opera really think it could pull it off? Could it avoid the pitfalls into triteness that surely lurk at every corner? How would the chorus manage it? And please God, let it be better than Glyndebourne’s 2007 St Matthew Passion.How do you go about staging Messiah anyway? It hardly provides a rip-roaring narrative stream, and there’s a danger Read more ...