Royal Opera
David Nice
Emotional truth is elusive in Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes” after Pushkin’s verse-novel. Overstress every feeling, as conductor Henrik Nánási did last night, and you leave some of us in the audience feeling manipulated. Play it cool, which is what we mostly get in Ted Huffman’s new production, and the heart is similarly untouched.There shouldn’t be a problem with modern dress – mostly stylish and colour-co-ordinated from costume designer Astrid Klein – even if here it doesn’t give us a sense of place (Hyemi Shin's grey stage leaves room only for a few props). That wouldn’t matter if the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Later this autumn Richard Eyre’s La Traviata celebrates its 30th birthday. Not bad going for the director’s first ever foray into opera – a genre he admitted holding an “unreasonable prejudice against”.And perhaps that’s the secret to this Royal Opera stalwart – the reliable banker that hasn’t been out of repertoire since its 1994 premiere, whose tightly-laced corsets have been filled, champagne glasses clinked and lace hankies bloodied by some 40 different sopranos. This is a production where liking opera really isn’t a pre-requisite.Bob Crowley’s belle époque designs don’t so much leave you Read more ...
David Nice
When will the Royal Opera give us a totally electrifying Carmen, rather than just a vocally perfect Carmen (as Aighul Akhmetshina surely is)? Supposed firebrand Damiano Michieletto’s production is mostly tepid after Barrie Kosky’s half-brilliant take. Kosky didn’t seem to care for his Don José or Micaëla, but as this officer turned smuggler fails to develop and the girl from his village is a plain-Jane cliché, there’s not much improvement on that front.Ukrainian soprano Olga Kulchynska’s Micaëla (pictured below) deserves better – as nuanced a delivery as Akhmetshina’s, promising great things Read more ...
David Nice
Abandon hope of the human comedy so precisely charted in Hilary Mantel’s related historical fiction The Giant, O’Brien, prepare for a vision of outsized body and soul revealed in sleep, and your patience will be rewarded. Sarah Angliss’s haunting Giant, premiered at last year's Aldeburgh Festival, is perfectly served by her own soundscape, a dedicated team of musicians and Sarah Fahie’s pitch-perfect production.Its stated intention is to avoid making too much of a God out of Irish giant Charles Byrne and too much of a Satan of Scottish surgeon, scientist and collector John Hunter, who may Read more ...
David Nice
Those were happy days back in 2014 when, justifiably flushed with the success of the Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde revival, director Christof Loy, music director Antonio Pappano and soprano Nina Stemme mooted possibly the toughest role challenge of them all, that of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s vengeful obsessive Elektra. Yet nearly a decade is a long time in the life of a dramatic soprano, and on last night’s evidence, it's come too late in London.The music drama might have carried it, but oddly, given Loy’s track record, nothing that happens onstage matches the focused intensity and spine- Read more ...
David Nice
Choosing a limited best seems almost meaningless when even simply the seven operatic experiences I've relished in the run-up to Christmas (nothing seasonal) deserve a place in the sun. But in a year which has seen Arts Council devastation versus brilliant business as usual where possible, English National Opera – faced with “Manchester or die” – needs the first shout-out for doing everything the moneygivers want it to.That came in the shape of Jeanine Tesori's Blue, with a powerful, unpreachy libretto by Tazewell Thompson, its very originally shaped drama of a young American Black boy Read more ...
David Nice
“Tell me,” The West Wing’s President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) asks of a right-wing TV host who uses the Bible to call homosexuality an abomination, “I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21.7… What would a good price for her be?” He might also have cited Judges 11 and asked about sacrificing his daughter as thanks for victory over his enemies, the position of Israelite Jephtha having massacred the Ammonites.Handel and his librettist Thomas Morell in their oratorio about Jephtha’s rash promise are equivocal about the filicide, to say the least, and Read more ...
David Nice
Let’s set aside, to begin with, the question of the concept, other than to praise it as consistent. Most vital about this brave new Rheingold is the vindication of director Barrie Kosky’s claim that “what makes a Ring production interesting is the detailed work within the scenes between the characters”. With a conductor as intent on clarity and meaning as Antonio Pappano, and a true ensemble of performers willing to go along with him and Kosky, the battle is three-quarters won.The close co-ordination gives us plenty of new musical-dramatic insights in Wagner's half-joky, half-deadly " Read more ...
David Nice
Not a good start. The tenor (Brian Jagde) walks downstage and sings loudly, if securely, to the audience: hardly a characterisation of an idealistic young Infante meditating on love. The next voice, the Page’s, is barely heard (Ella Taylor gets better). Then we have The Presence: Lise Davidsen, who you know is Elisabeth de Valois in the only carefree mode she’s to experience throughout the opera.Davidsen holds this otherwise rather tired, if well sung and scrupulously conducted, revival of Nicholas Hytner’s respectable production together. Yes, nearly all the figures in Verdi’s adaptation of Read more ...
David Nice
The trouble with Trovatore, Verdi’s sometimes barrel-organish, slightly middle-aged troubadour, isn’t so much the silly shocker of a plot, triggered by a gypsy so crazed with vengeance that she throws her own baby on a bonfire by mistake, as the choppy dramatic line, so hard to thread. Under the circumstance, Adele Thomas’s medieval-hell production could have been a lot worse, and the vocal quality is there throughout under Antonio Pappano’s watchful guidance.Two of the cast are officially new to the run, though soprano Rachel Willis-Sørensen had already replaced Marina Rebeka in some Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Benoit Jacquot’s handsome period production of Werther has been quietly putting in the miles for the Royal Opera. Since its premiere in 2004, this unexceptionable staging – “this wall, this fountain, this cool shade” all present and laboriously correct – has supplied a London star vehicle for everyone from Joyce DiDonato and Isabel Leonard to Juan Diego Florez, Rollando Villazon and Vittorio Grigolo. Now it’s the turn of Jonas Kaufmann – or, at least, it was supposed to be.No announcement was made, but it was evident from his opening “Je ne sais si je veille” – almost lost under Antonio Read more ...
David Nice
If you’re going to be locked in an auditorium with a crazed soldier for over 90 minutes, you need to be overwhelmed by the human frailty and baseness in Büchner’s still-shocking stage play of the late 1830s, the spiderweb beauty of Berg’s 1925 score to match it and a vision in various stage pictures. Director Deborah Warner, conductor Antonio Pappano and set designer Hyemi Shin deliver on all fronts.Though each of Shin’s stunning images is perfectly composed, and so well lit by Adam Silverman, there’s less unity in Warner’s production than there was in, for example, Richard Jones’s Welsh Read more ...