London Coliseum
David Nice
"Bad Star Trek episodes" is how one director describes a certain unfortunate look in would-be intergalactic opera productions. The late Nikolaus Lehnhoff came perilously close to it in his Glyndebourne Tristan und Isolde but offered a coherent vision. Daniel Kramer, now ENO's Artistic Director, has a few "bad Star Trek episodes" and many good ideas that don't always join up or else outstay their welcome. Unevennness abounds: hideous costumes and makeup clash with Anish Kapoor's eventually brilliant designs, singing and conducting are only patchily inspired.Let's celebrate the best first. Read more ...
David Nice
Within the wounded, divided company of English National Opera – artists and administration still at loggerheads – the buzz is surprisingly positive. CEO Cressida Pollock does finally seem to be listening: union deputies from chorus and orchestra met the final candidates for the too-long-dormant role of Artistic Director. From what I gleaned last night after the final blazing performance of Brahms's A German Requiem under the best Music Director I've seen at ENO in my lifetime, Mark Wigglesworth, they liked what they'd heard from the new incumbent, Daniel Kramer.The 39-year-old American-born Read more ...
David Nice
Could the fascination of Glenn Close's Norma Desmond transcend the frequent bathos of Lloyd Webber? Would they have sorted out the miking which wrecked last year's first choice of semi-ENO musical, the infinitely superior Sweeney Todd? Yes, to varying degrees. But the real saviour here was the ENO Orchestra, fresh from its triumph alongside its inseparable chorus at the Olivier Awards and now on hand to make a silk purse, or rather a gold cigarette-holder, out of a patchy but always superbly orchestrated score.Still, give a diva her due. There's little doubt that if Billy Wilder had been Read more ...
David Nice
"Just listen". That's an imperative, of course, but it can be a very fair and reasonable one if the tone is right. It was Claudio Abbado's encouragement to his Lucerne Festival Orchestra players to make chamber music writ large. It also sounds persuasive and not at all militant coming from the mouths of ENO chorus members as their plea to the dramatic changes proposed by Chief Executive Officer Cressida Pollock, appointed a year ago. But listening to all levels of the company is something she never did in the first place, which is why, with two petitions running respectively way above 5,000 Read more ...
David Nice
In the light of what follows, it's probably best to be clear that I'm completely behind the artistic side of ENO in rejecting a 25 per cent reduction of the chorus's annual salary, tied to a shorter season. A full-time chorus of this size is the heart of a big company – without it, no Mastersingers, no Grimes, no Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. A creative alternative solution must be found. Musically matters stand stronger than ever, with the new regime's most recent hit being a transformation of what was originally a lame-duck Magic Flute. Production wise, this Norma Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
It’s being sold as the ideal ballet for first-timers, but I would blush to introduce even my neighbour’s cat to this Carry On Up the Harem hokum. Worse, its silliness verges on offensive. When, in Rudolph Nureyev’s 1990s production of La Bayadère for Paris Opera Ballet, a chorus of blacked-up picaninnies appeared for about three minutes, you blinked and put it down to an unwise attempt at historical accuracy. By contrast ENB’s Le Corsaire, now embarking on its third London season, is almost entirely devoted to the simperings of sex slaves in spangly bras, the violent squabbles of a bunch of Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas legends are not born; they are made. In the case of the Nutcracker, its Christmas indispensability in Britain and America stems not from the original 1892 St Petersburg production, but from 1950s reinterpretations by emigré Russians (Balanchine and Karinska in the US, Lichine and Benois in the UK). Like most other story ballets, there is no stable text - apart from the Tchaikovsy score, of course, but Balanchine was happy to cut and rearrange that too. The rest is a palimpsest of story treatments, costume designs, and questionable psychoanalytic interpretations, presenting many Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
“Every time I go on stage it could be the last,” Carlos Acosta warned a few years back. And now that moment has come – or very nearly. There are a scant six performances of this farewell gala at the Coliseum (largely a reprise of an Olivier-winning programme he presented in 2006). Then he picks it up again next May, with different supporting dancers, for a fleeting regional tour. Those quick enough to have bagged a ticket are in for a treat.Acosta has always given good gala. Aware of the potential choppiness of the traditional format – a meat-counter display of bleeding chunks, hacked from Read more ...
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 ...
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 ...
David Nice
Mark Wigglesworth and I go back quite a long way in terms of meetings – namely to 1996, when I interviewed him for Gramophone about the launch of his Shostakovich symphonies cycle on BIS. He completed it a decade later, though that release hung fire until last year. We should have discussed the whole project shortly afterwards, but despite his generously coming to talk to the students in what was then my Opera in Focus class about Parsifal, which we were studying, I wasn’t able to keep my part of the bargain.Now, then, is just the right time. Having literally stunned us with his deep, dark Read more ...