ENO
fisun.guner
A 50th birthday is a landmark occasion. One has plenty to look back on, whilst still having much to look forward to. Plus there’s all that life experience to draw on. What’s not to feel positive about? In the case of a gallery that’s built up a remarkable reputation as an innovative space for contemporary art outside London, sheer staying power is surely to be cheered and celebrated – "hear hear" for the next 50 years, and so forth.But it’s also worth asking whether middle age hasn’t precipitated some kind of quiet crisis for Bristol's Arnolfini gallery. It’s not fair, of course, to judge on Read more ...
David Nice
No two creative artists have a stronger right to make a valid statement about Auschwitz than a Polish-born composer who escaped his family's fate by fleeing to Russia, only to fall into another anti-Semitic trap, and a Polish writer whose clear-eyed transmutation of her three years in the camp inspired the opera. Neither, of course, guarantees the end result of great art. But Mieczysław Weinberg, Shostakovich's dearest disciple who died in 1996 without having seen his most cherished project staged, and novelist Zofia Posmysz, an elegant 88-year-old who having attended the Bregenz Festival Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“An elixir with a kick, sir, one that really packs a punch”, sings Adina in Jonathan Miller’s Midwestern The Elixir of Love, and she couldn’t be more right. A night spent among the floral prints, perky ponytails and pastel wipe-down surfaces of this production is like being battered around the head with a bouquet of roses wielded by Doris Day. Frame the encounter in a Hopper-inspired set from which all traces of menace have been expunged – no nighthawks dare lurk in bustling Adina’s Diner – and you have the perfect operatic antidote (more effective than any of Dulcamara’s potions) to the Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Nico Muhly had one humble aim for his first opera. He wanted to create an episode of Prime Suspect, he told me last week. "A grand opera that functions as a good night's entertainment." There's no doubt he's achieved that. Two Boys, receiving its world premiere last night at the English National Opera, is as gripping an operatic thriller as any ever penned. But is there more to the work than that? The opera tackles the great themes of our age: the internet, youth corruptibility, sexual coming of age. And while Muhly's music deals with these with a humanity and wisdom that opens many more Read more ...
David Nice
It's not often that we in the critical world revisit a production towards the end of a run to see how it's settled. I had two reasons for wanting to return to Christopher Alden's English National Opera production of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream. First, I wanted to hear the liquid-gold countertenor of Iestyn Davies in action as Oberon, since he'd been voice-indisposed for one night only (and superbly doubled in that capacity by William Towers). But above all, this is perhaps the most thought-provoking and haunting staging I've seen at ENO over the past two decades, and I wanted friends Read more ...
David Nice
Public feuding, private sorrows: the elemental passions of Verdi's Ligurian power struggle haven't had a vivid London staging since the Alden-Fielding ENO classic gave it a guiding (or, according to taste, hindering) giant hand in the late 1980s. Dmitri Tcherniakov, the most disciplined opera director to have come out of Russia, was a clever choice for the company to invite to the Coliseum. But would his Boccanegra more resemble the thought-through revelations of his Bolshoi Eugene Onegin or the fits-and-starts family carry-on of his Aix Don Giovanni?In the end, it occupies a grey zone Read more ...
David Nice
Just think, said a veteran enthusiast of Britten's operas when I showed him the earliest publicity designs for Christopher Alden's production, you could set them all in a school, even Gloriana - what about headmistress Bess and head prefect Essex? But could you squidge everything into the one shape, I wondered? At ENO, it makes instant sense in the composer's near-perfect musical translation of Shakespearean wood magic that Oberon is the schoolmaster who prefers changeling pre-pubescents to now-adolescent, discarded Pucks. That's the strongest of starting points. But can the basic premise Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Contemporary music and 11 new productions are at the heart of a strong ENO 2011-12 season announced today. Highlights include a new opera from Damon Albarn (Doctor Dee) on the extraordinary life of Elizabethan alchemist and intellectual John Dee, the UK premiere of Detlev Glanert's Caligula, Wolfgang Rihm's chamber opera (which will open at the Hampstead Theatre) Jakob Lenz and the first Coliseum staging of John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, "the most controversial opera of the past 50 years", according to artistic director John Berry.Contemporary music and Read more ...
David Nice
Anything goes in the wacky world of Berlioz’s Faust story. It’s a heaven and hell of a lot better than Gounod’s, but it isn’t an opera, it isn’t an oratorio and it certainly isn’t the gospel according to Goethe. So Terry Gilliam, ENO’s latest wild-card debut director, was right not to play by all of the composer’s already rather warped rules. At first you sigh: not the Nazis and the Holocaust again. But only an oddball visionary like Gilliam is going to come anywhere near the often disorienting musical pictures painted by the most original of Romantics.And the Romantic movement in which Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Wars have no end. Soldiers may come home, battlefields may be vacated, peace treaties signed, but scars remain. The violence of combat has a way of revisiting itself on the victors and vanquished and ravaging soul and state. This was the message of Benedict Andrews's new production of Monteverdi's The Return of Ulysses for the English National Opera at the Young Vic, which sees Ithaca as a mutilated world, inhabited by a suicidal wife, a brutalised soldier and a society grotesquely drunk on its own supremacy.The curtain lifts on a grieving widow. Penelope circles her cage, a shiny modern Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
At 25 years old, Jonathan Miller’s Mikado may be more Grande Dame than ingénue, but it still has a Charleston kick in its step and a shimmy in its pearls. Styled and stylised, chic and slick, it's as far from the operetta’s ubiquitous am-dram incarnations as from the Japan of the original. Yet just as the Minimalist decor and monochrome palette of an Art Deco interior prove unforgiving to the smallest hint of dust or casual clutter, so the sharp lines of this production provide little cover for the relaxed paunch or middle-aged spreadings of a revival.Bathed in a lava flow of white Read more ...
David Nice
Hot on the heels of our feature celebrating 25 years of Jonathan Miller's Mikado at English National Opera, the latest revival of which opens tonight, veteran Savoyard Richard Suart sent through the most recent candidates for the Lord High Executioner's chop as he will be delivering them onstage (with no doubt a twist or two as the run proceeds).Understandably he didn't want me to spill all the beans, but gave his gracious consent to the preview of a few victims in the latest of his now celebrated spins on Gilbert's lyrics. They include - no prizes for having guessed this one -
The Prime Read more ...