ENO
theartsdesk
A stage performance in any art form communicates through sound and motion. A photographer's task is to capture the dramatic experience in the silence and stillness of the 2D image. In the worlds of ballet and opera, none does it with more commitment to truth and drama than the great Laurie Lewis. To mark the end of the 2012-13 season, we present 25 images selected by the photographer exclusively for theartsdesk. They comprise a snapshot of the last nine months of work witnessed by audiences at the Royal Opera House, Sadler's Wells, the London Coliseum, the Barbican and beyond. There's even Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Austere, beautiful, heartbreaking, streaked with genius - that goes for both Benjamin Britten’s last opera Death in Venice and Deborah Warner’s remarkable production of it for ENO, returning all too briefly to the Coliseum, with a superb central performance. Besiege the box office for one of the four remaining performances if you want to see contemporary operatic art refined to its most personal and powerful.The story is well-known from Thomas Mann’s novella and Luchino Visconti’s classic film: the downfall of a mature novelist who visits Venice to break his writer’s block, and there falls in Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
There were a small but substantial number of children dotted around the auditorium at the opening night of The Perfect American, and one hopes they hadn’t been led to expect singalong-a-Disney, all bright colours and catchy tunes. The piece takes place in the last few months of Walt Disney’s life, as his diagnosis with late stage lung cancer prompts introspective angst about the meaning of his success and legacy, and the terrible contrast between his own mortality and the agelessness of his creations. The great man’s personal flaws are laid bare.Directed by Phelim McDermott – of Read more ...
edward.seckerson
If you should take your seats prematurely in the London Coliseum you’ll find yourself confronted with a group of serving British soldiers. You’ll shift a little uneasily under their gaze. There they are, staring, smoking, loitering; there we are, on a visit to the opera. There’s a disconnect. Among those soldiers is Wozzeck (Leigh Melrose), the eponymous anti-hero of Alban Berg's operatic masterpiece. And since it's not too often that stagings of the opera actually address the issue of his profession there is an added immediacy. This is the here and now of a Britain effectively still caught Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
I’m not one to get misty-eyed over La bohème (unless it be a red mist of rage), but this second revival of Jonathan Miller’s production at English National Opera brought me closer than any yet to understanding the snuffling, lip-quivering reactions of those around me in the Coliseum stalls. And if it wasn’t exactly emotion that got me there, then perhaps it was something even better: sentimental delight in joyous, glorious music-making.La bohème has suffered more than most operas at the hands of clever directors and conceptual visions. But at this stage in his career Miller has nothing to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Sunken Garden is described officially as a “film opera”. Two words. Emphatically unhyphenated. No attempt made to neologise or fashion some third-way genre terminology. It’s not a symbol that bodes well for mutually-informed, sensitive interdisciplinary thinking, but in Michael Van der Aa and David Mitchell’s work English National Opera have come one tiny, shuffling step closer to realising that elusive multimedia idée fixe that has so preoccupied the company under John Berry.First we had the atrocity that was Mike Figgis’s Lucrezia Borgia (soft-core rompings on screen and wooden barkings on Read more ...
Jasper Rees
“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin and say, ‘When you’re ready.’” The words belong to Jason Taylor, the stammering 13-year-old poet protagonist of David Mitchell's novel Black Swan Green. But they will do for any artist presenting fresh work. Mitchell is going through an extracurricular phase of presenting fresh work to a different kind of audience. The most widely read of his four novels – Cloud Atlas – was released as a star-spangled film earlier this year. And this week brings the world premiere of his libretto for the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
There is only one rule by which one should ever judge a Barber of Seville. If your eyes (and possibly also your trouser legs) aren’t moist by the time the interval arrives, you might as well leave. The last time this Jonathan Miller production was revived by the English National Opera, it passed with flying colours. This time round, I was dry as a bone. Three hours and I notched up two smiles and a snigger.There’s little wrong with designer Tanya McCallin’s set-up, traditional and 18th century though it all very earnestly is. It’s all neatly tailored to allowing this smooth-as-clockwork Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
How do you solve a problem like Medea? Euripides’ baby-killing, hell-invoking sorceress is one of literature’s most terrifying and unfathomable creations – a woman capable of murdering her own children just to watch their father’s pain. Yet with the blood on her hands now centuries-old, Medea continues to work her grim enchantments on artists. No fewer than eight operas (and an almost equal number of plays) have staged her story, but have any really got to grips with the psychology of tragedy’s wickedest witch? I’m afraid that Georg Benda’s 1775 Medea is unknown to me, as is Saverio Read more ...
David Nice
How’s a good time girl to bare her beautiful soul when a director seems bent on cutting her down to puppet size? It doesn't bother me that Peter Konwitschny shears Verdi’s already concise score by about 20 minutes to shoehorn it into a one-act drama; what goes is either inessential or among the usual casualties of standard Traviatas. The spare and economical idea of layered curtains to symbolise the characters' constriction or emancipation is good in principle, too. But so impassioned is American soprano Corinne Winters’s Violetta that to rob her of any meaningful relationships with the man Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
We had already been reassured in interviews that Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen would not be shocking, although perhaps this was more a warning to those of us hoping that it might be. Bieito’s radical reputation is well earned, although approaching 50 he is by no means an enfant and clearly not so terrible anymore either.The first scene opens with a soldier wearing nothing but Y-fronts and boots, holding a rifle and running round the stage, presumably as a punishment handed out by Corporal Moralès or Lieutenant Zuniga. In fact, there are bits and bobs of undressing at various stages of Read more ...
Richard Scott
Clearly rents in 2010 were substantially cheaper than I remember because somehow Rodolfo and Marcello have managed to find a garret in Soho of all places. And it would be easy to continue my review in this vein, poking the odd hole in OperaUpClose’s updating of La Bohème, including mentioning my temptation to shout out, “Pawn your laptop for some Covonia, mate, your girlfriend’s got a right cough on her!” But none of those quibbles were really the point of this production. While we did begin in a lacklustre set of IKEA furniture, with some shy, awkward lad acting from the quartet of Read more ...