London Coliseum
Boyd Tonkin
Well, it wasn’t quite Messiah, but it was a source of joy. In ENO’s end-of-lockdown staging, BBC Two’s transmission of Handel’s resurrection song delivered a scant 54 minutes of music from the Coliseum on Easter Saturday. In contrast, two ancient Poirot movies, staples of Bank Holiday line-ups roughly since the Pleistocene Era, had hogged fully four hours of the channel’s afternoon schedule. Miserly, timid, cheese-paring, grudging: the Proms partially excepted, BBC TV’s default attitude to classical music never fails to disappoint – even when the oratorio in question has been a beloved pillar Read more ...
David Nice
It must have felt very strange to Mark Wigglesworth that he returned to the London Coliseum under such unanticipated circumstances. ENO’s shortest-lived but also (many of us think) best Music Director campaigned from the start for direct communication with the audience, in that magic triangle between composer, performers and spectators, and lived it to the full in all the productions he conducted (“we underestimate the public as performers at our peril,” he told me in 2015 before taking up the post). Now, replacing a self-quarantining Martyn Brabbins, his successor, he had his back to an Read more ...
David Nice
So Susanna and Figaro got married on Saturday, just before the entire Almaviva household and its home, the London Coliseum, went into quarantine. Let's at least celebrate the fact that these splendid singer-actors, with youth especially on the five main principals' side, saw so much hard work on forging an ensemble and co-ordinating as best they could with conductor Kevin John Edusei in the Coliseum's big, Mozart-unfriendly space come to fruition, if only for one night.Director Joe Hill-Gibbins, a genuinely original force in theatre whose Edward II at the National shook up the literalism of Read more ...
David Nice
Those who booed the production team last night - there was nothing but generous cheering for singers, conductor and orchestra - might reflect that this was at least regietheater, that singular brand of not-all-bad director's opera in Germany, with discipline and purpose close enough to its subject. There were some cliches and the occasional question-mark - who's the trembling, plastic-wrapped youth in underpants and why the nearby oil drum? - but you had to hand it to Barbora Horáková for making everything connect, in however stylised a way.Think back to Daniel Kramer's party nightmare in La Read more ...
Sue Gaisford
Just when you thought Christmas was well and truly over, along comes another box of delights. And there isn’t a disappointment in it. If it were nuts, there’d be nothing but cashews; if chocolates, there wouldn’t be a single disgusting lime-cream. It would be all Ferrero Rochers, gift-wrapped. English National Ballet’s 70th birthday party opened and closed with class, in every sense.The lights went down and “Good morning, class”, we heard, as the regular daily routine at the barre began. There followed a seamless programme of vignettes and titbits, memories and displays of virtuosity, more Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s unlikely that Lord Byron would recognise much about Le Corsaire. Beyond the characters’ names and the Ottoman location, there is little trace of the 1814 bestselling verse-novel on whose fame the ballet hitched a ride. Its plot is very silly indeed – a tale of abducted slave girls and piratical derring-do with added 19th-century ballet tropes of poisoned flowers and opium-induced dreams, not to mention a shipwreck in the final three minutes. It’s the kind of hokum it normally takes a big Russian company to bring off, but in this revival of Anna-Marie Holmes’s 2013 production English Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
A pas de deux is normally an opportunity for two dancers to express the pinnacle of their skill and the choreographer's art. In the case of McGregor + Mugler, the duet receiving its world premiere as part of a Russian-sponsored triple bill, it became an opportunity for a big-name designer to strut his stuff."My Little Pony From Outer Space" seemed to be the theme as Bolshoi prima ballerina Olga Smirnova and the Royal Ballet’s Edward Watson (main picture, and below) stepped out on the stage of the Coliseum virtually naked but for chrome helmets, chrome shin-guards and a membrane of glittery Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
What price a pair of seats at the ballet? If you’re talking the latest starry Russian import then, with a few perks thrown in, you might not see much change from £800. And yet the size of the first-night crowd queuing for Modanse, a double bill starring the Bolshoi prima Svetlana Zakharova and a bunch of her pals, apparently required the erection of crush barriers along St Martin’s Lane.The evening is dominated by Gabrielle Chanel, an hour-long biog-ballet in the course of which Zakharova gets to look chic in no fewer than seven of the couturière’s iconic outfits and slouch moodily 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 ...