ENO
Gavin Dixon
Verdi’s dark tale gets even darker in this new staging from Calixto Bieito. He updates the story to the Spanish Civil War, a setting with plenty of opportunity for his trademark violence but also offering illuminating parallels on the story itself. ENO has assembled a fine cast for the occasion, and the musical direction, from Mark Wigglesworth, is dynamic and dramatically engaged. The result is a staging that gives rare focus to this sprawling score, and to its grim implications of tragedy and fate.Bieito explains that the civil war setting offers a parallel to the central family drama of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
It’s odd seeing the whole of Edward Gardner, as upright as a guardsman until a passionate passage unleashes a repertoire of fierce jabs, deft feints and rapid thrusts. For nine years Gardner's main post was on the podium in the pit of the London Coliseum where all you could see were his disembodied hands and, slowly silvering over the course of his tenure, his schoolboy haircut. It was only at the curtain that he would bound on in a boxy black suit to throw a sweeping arm in the direction of his orchestra.That time is now over. Gardner has left English National Opera and taken up a new Read more ...
David Nice
Kurt Cobain’s “Smells like Teen Spirit’ cued a realistic song and drink routine for Chekhov’s Three Sisters in a hit-and-miss update by director Benedict Andrews. This one, with a Puccini soundtrack unsupportively conducted by Xian Zhang, smells more like routine spirit with a couple of jolts along the way, a sludgy requiem for drug-fuelled twenty-somethings.Moving forward in time the action of Puccini’s inspiration, Henri Murger’s still fresh and authentic memories of bohemian youth in 1830s Paris, is more the rule than the exception now. The late Steven Pimlott did it with more infill at Read more ...
David Nice
“The music quacks, hoots, pants and gasps”: whichever of his Pravda scribes Stalin commandeered to demolish Shostakovich’s “tragedy-satire” in January 1936, two years into its wildly successful stage history, didn’t mean that as a compliment, but it defines one extreme of the ENO Orchestra’s stupendous playing under its new Music Director Mark Wigglesworth. On the other hand there are also heartbreaking tenderness, terrifying whispers and aching sensuousness. A fuller picture of Shostakovich’s murdering heroine as 20th - or even 21st - century Russian woman couldn’t be imagined; soprano Read more ...
theartsdesk
September is upon us and it’s nearly time for the new season. English National Opera’s Artistic Director John Berry may have left the building but his enterprising legacy lives on in a 2015-16 season that looks on paper as good as any in the past 20 years; what happens after that is anyone's guess. Still, there shouldn’t be too much grief that ENO Music Director Edward Gardner has moved on, since his successor Mark Wigglesworth already has a fine track record with the company.Over at the Royal Opera, it’s business as usual with Antonio Pappano and at least one rarity to match Szymanowski’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The delicacy of its supernatural elements make Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades, as adapted by Tchaikovsky, a tricky proposition for any director. Do you go with the ghost story and risk losing your audience emotionally, or do you play it straight, trying to rationalise the plot’s moments of macabre? The hands of the clock stand perpetually arrested just moments before midnight in David Alden’s new production for ENO, putting his audience out of any doubt as to which he has chosen.Setting the opera in hospital or mental institution is not a new idea, but one that serves Alden well in a large- Read more ...
David Nice
When ENO announced its return to Gilbert and Sullivan, rapture at the news that Mike Leigh, genius Topsy-Turvy director, would be the master of wonderland ceremonies was modified by its choice, The Pirates of Penzance. Last staged at the Coliseum – and unmemorably – as recently as 2004, the fifth Savoy opera seemed less in need of revisiting than several larger-scale successors. By the end of last night, though, it was clear not only that Leigh and his musical team had been the best possible choice to tackle this work of classical perfection, but also that if operatic schedules could be Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Composer Tansy Davies and librettist Nick Drake’s opera Between Worlds cannot help but be a devastating tribute to the tragedy of 9/11. Yet the whole is peppered with problems that mean this result is achieved only intermittently. Davies – whose first opera this is – and the playwright Drake, with Deborah Warner directing, have picked a topic that would seem at first glance to demand the scale of a modern-day Götterdämmerung. The result they extrapolate is far from that – but when it does succeed, it is in ways that are not really about 9/11 at all.This is, essentially, the final section, in Read more ...
Marianka Swain
From Singin’ in the Rain and Anything Goes to Hello, Dolly! and Mary Poppins, Olivier Award winner Stephen Mear has done more than any other British choreographer to usher classic musicals into the modern era. But adept as he is at razzle-dazzling ’em, there’s more to Mear, as recent excursions like City of Angels at Donmar Warehouse and Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera prove. His contribution to the lauded Gypsy revival, opening next week at the Savoy Theatre following a triumphant Chichester run, demonstrates the combination of emotional engagement and quick-witted Read more ...
David Nice
Still they keep coming, 35 years on from the London premiere of Sondheim's "musical thriller": Sweeneys above pubs, in pie shops, concert halls and theatres of all sizes, on the big screen, Sweeneys with symphony orchestras, two pianos or a handful of instruments wielded by the singers, Sweeneys as musicals and as operas, the dumpy and the tall. Which type was this one? Not a vintage English National Opera production, that much seems clear.A year after this more than semi-staging's Lincoln Centre unveiling with the New York Philharmonic, the ENO Orchestra is very much centre stage, a huge Read more ...
David Nice
Having been bowled over by the total work of art English National Opera made of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg on its first night, I bought tickets immediately afterwards for the final performance. So I’m off tonight to catch the farewell of what has been an unqualified triumph for the company. Yet only last Thursday an unsolicited email arrived from Amazon Local – there’s no stopping them, it seems – offering tickets for this very show at 40 per cent discount.Now, it’s bizarre that, given the high levels of Wagnerolatry in London, any of the composer's operas doesn’t sell out before Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
When Purcell died at just 36, he left The Indian Queen unfinished, which only adds to the usual problems of staging his "semi-operas" – plays with musical interludes which don’t really accord with modern operatic tastes, despite the ravishing beauty of the music itself.Rather than tinkering around the edges, Peter Sellars – the director best known for his long-standing partnership with John Adams – has created a new piece entirely. Its narrated plot, borrowed from Nicaraguan novelist Rosario Aguilar's The Lost Chronicles of Terra Firma, is set around a particularly savage episode in the Read more ...