ENO
David Nice
Could English National Opera be about to right the wrong done to a national treasure? Elizabeth Llewellyn was Brixton born - with what she calls a usual childhood, recorders and chime bars at primary school, followed by special opportunities at a secondary independent girls’ school which had “a lot of everything, sport, music, debating”, then on to the Royal Northern College of Music “where I really was very much the runt of the litter” but is now a Fellow - National Opera Centre trained and Peter Moores Foundation funded. She made a huge impression at the Coliseum as Mimì in a 2010 revival Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Doctor, writer, sculptor, curator, comedian, presenter and director, Sir Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was one of the mighty cultural and intellectual omnivores of our age. To those of a musical or theatrical bent, however, Miller was above all one of the greatest of British opera directors, whose many collaborations with the English National Opera - whether in his mafia Rigoletto, his Edwardian Mikado or the sitcom-sharpness of his Barber of Seville - resulted in the most enduringly popular operatic productions in British history. In 2012, as he returned to the ENO with a Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like almost everything that it touches these days, English National Opera’s autumn season of shows rooted in the Orpheus myth has enjoyed a fairly mixed reception. The company’s programme of visits to the Underworld concludes with another high-risk journey: Philip Glass’s 1993 opera Orphée, inspired by the 1950 film that Jean Cocteau spun from his own earlier drama on this theme. From the off, as director Netia Jones (in her ENO debut) tells us, Glass and Cocteau have drawn us into a hall of endlessly reflecting mirrors, a game of shadows and doubles in which each story and treatment of the Read more ...
David Nice
Advance publicity overstated the case for The Mask of Orpheus. "Iconic"? Only to academics and acolytes, for British audiences haven't had a chance to see a production since ENO's world premiere run in 1986. "Masterpiece"? Sitting there after the second interval 33 years ago, surrounded by empty seats long vacated (by fellow critics, shame on them, among others), and facing a third act with a sense of fatigue, I hardly thought so then. And though I can hear the virtues more clearly now, the dead directorial hand of Daniel Kramer has turned an already complex, sometimes obscure layering of Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Maybe some British opera houses just don’t get operetta. Without wit, lightness and snappy pace, cudgelling us with desperate relevance, the frothiest works crash to earth stone cold dead. There have been disasters elsewhere, too, though ENO is the chief culprit, and (after a miserable Merry Widow and a fearful Fledermaus) this one is the nail in the coffenbach. If you think that’s a bad joke, wait til you hear the ones on stage.In the myth of Orpheus, the demigod’s bride, Eurydice, dies of a snakebite; he goes to Hades to persuade the god of the underworld, through Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
English National Opera chose a curiously low-key production to open their season. Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice has only three singing roles and very little action. For this production, Wayne McGregor has reimagined the work as an opera/dance hybrid. That brings a valuable dynamic element to Gluck’s stately discourses, but there are few interpretive insights here, and the almost non-existent sets made more demands on the dance than even McGregor’s sophisticated choreography could sustain.The opera itself contains many ballet numbers, so the dance element makes sense. And McGregor resists the Read more ...
David Nice
Benjamin Britten's musical mystery tour is still bringing young communities together to work with professionals at the highest level 61 years on from its premiere in a Suffolk church, and Lyndsey Turner's sweet production at Stratford must have been as much fun to be in as any. But Britten also had special concerns about communication, speaking eloquently about a "magic triangle" of three equal points - the work, the performers and the audience. Confine much of Noye's Fludde behind a proscenium arch in an intimate theatre, and you immediately introduce the element of Them and Us. Place the Read more ...
David Nice
Shoving a child-eating drag-queen witch into an oven can't be good for any kid's psyche. Director Timothy Sheader doesn't let us forget it in a production which nevertheless treads a fine line between the darkness of the Grimm story and the fairytale incandescence which is a given of this masterly opera. There's deep magic in an amphitheatre of real trees complete with birdsong – the onstage wood is made of witches' planted broomsticks – with performances of a uniformly high standard from the first of two casts, and bewitching sounds from select players of the English National Opera Orchestra Read more ...
Marianka Swain
English National Opera continues its run of semi-staged musicals, in commercial collaboration with Grade Linnit, with a revival of this vintage oddity. Mind, commercial might be a stretch, as Dale Wasserman, Joe Darion and Mitch Leigh's 1965 work – it quickly transpires – is a tough sell, particularly in a quixotically cast revival that struggles to find a coherent tone. Loosely inspired by Don Quixote, the densely layered musical sees author Miguel de Cervantes (Kelsey Grammer) awaiting trial by the Spanish Inquisition. When put on trial by his fellow prisoners as well, with his Read more ...
David Nice
If you can’t put a name to any of Jack the Ripper’s victims – and spin it however you please, victims they remain – then you shouldn’t buy the publicity about this new opera "bringing dignity back" to the murdered women in question. Isn’t it time to stop feeding the troll/killer, much as Jacinda Ardern did so swiftly and movingly under different circumstances last week, and let the five eviscerated corpses return to dust in peace? Composer Iain Bell, disturbed by their fates from an early age, sincerely thought otherwise. But though he serves up some carefully-considered vocal writing at ENO Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s all there. High kicks and tight corsets; silk and sequins and shenanigans in a broom closet; hot pinks and still hotter can-can girls; waltzing, scheming, sparring, and a bit with a banquet table. There’s even a dancing beaver. So why don’t I feel more elated?English National Opera’s new Merry Widow can’t be faulted for effort. But in comedy, as in seduction or sales, trying too hard can be almost as destructive as not trying at all. Gripping Lehar’s crystal champagne flute of an operetta in a hot fist only leads to spillage and a swift loss of bubbles.Everyone’s had a go at the Widow. Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You start off fighting it. Those arpeggios, the insistent reduction, simplification, repetition, the amplification of the smallest gesture into an epic. Then something happens. Somewhere among the slow-phase patterns pulsing on ear and eye, you surrender to Glass-time and the hypnosis is complete.Akhnaten is opera as therapy, as cocoon, as mindfulness exercise, clean as Marie Kondo’s living room and every bit as consoling. When you reduce your musical possessions to the barest minimum (hell, even the violins get jettisoned in this deliciously grainy score, along with the surtitles) you throw Read more ...