London Coliseum
David Nice
A great creative partnership like the one between composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars can endure the occasional wobble. In his peerless autobiography Hallelujah Junction Adams is frank about the information overload in Sellars’ premiere production of the millennial opera-oratorio woven around the birth of Christ, El Niño. His semi-staging of its companion piece The Gospel According to the Other Mary seen at the Barbican last year was, on the other hand, so pure, focused and perfect within Sellars’ usual semaphoring bounds, that I feared the full works might unleash excess again. Read more ...
David Nice
ENO may not always have matched the Royal Opera in the Great Puccini Voices stakes. But it's served up many of the classiest Mimìs, with Valerie Masterson, Mary Plazas and Elizabeth Llewellyn as top seamstresses. Californian former beauty queen Angel Blue, an acclaimed Musetta in the previous revival, now joins them. Unlike Llewellyn, still awaiting the international recognition she deserves, Blue is also among the favoured roster of young sopranos who, after an interregnum where we wondered where all the best black opera singers had gone - whether the spell of Leontyne Price and Jessye Read more ...
David Nice
So now it’s Minnie Get Your Gun from the director who brought us the gobsmackingly inventive Young Vic Annie (as in sharpshooter Oakley, not Little Orphan). Richard Jones’s subversive but still very human take on Irving Berlin discombobulated its American support and never made Broadway; but there’s little here that would rock the steadily progressive Met (home of La fanciulla del West’s 1910 premiere, with Enrico Caruso as “Dick Johnson” aka quickly repentant bandit Ramerrez). Girl should certainly go well in Santa Fe, sharing this production with ENO.Jones knows better in his maturity than Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Mounting a contemporary dance show together doesn’t seem like the best way to get over your ex, even if you are (or rather, were) ballet’s most fabulously marketable couple. But whatever their real-life relationship, audiences will always be keen – as last night’s packed Coliseum proved – to see Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev, the electric, magnetic young Russians whose performances with the Bolshoi and the Mikhailovsky provoked such devoted fandom that they even got their own shorthand: Vasipova.The show they are mounting now is Osipova’s brainchild. Her determination and focus are Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Last night’s performance of PUSH at the London Colisem left me exhilarated and downcast in equal measure. Exhilarated because dancer Sylvie Guillem, dancer/choreographer Russell Maliphant and lighting genius Michael Hulls together create the Holy Grail of dance, a blend of intelligence, talent and charisma so stunning and convincing that it seems to trascend description and become sacramental. And downcast because this run is the last of PUSH in London, and so for most of us the last time we’ll ever see it, or perhaps even see Guillem or Maliphant perform.Rarely has the transience of dance as Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
For all it’s a balmy July here, the litany of appalling news from the world’s conflict zones will have left many of us feeling less than summery at heart. In that frame of mind, you might wonder whether Coppélia, English National Ballet’s latest production, is quite what you want to see. We are speaking, after all, of a frothy 19th-century comic ballet, full of charading silliness, populated by unfeasibly cheerful peasants, and ending happily with the all-too-predictable wedding. Sharp social commentary – or existential comfort – it ain’t.But ENB has several treasures on its hands that make Read more ...
David Nice
Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from previous seasons of what had once seemed like Andris Liepa’s Ballets Russes vanity project. Mariinsky star of long standing Yulia Makhalina sprinkled gala stardust, the corps of the revelatory Natalia Sats Children’s Theatre re-enacted Fokine’s routines with theatrical flair and that energy levels were so high throughout had everything to do with the Read more ...
David Nice
Rimsky-Korsakov’s bizarre final fantasy, puffing up Pushkin's short verse-tale to unorthodox proportions, has done better in Britain than any of his other operatic fairy-tales. That probably has something to do with its appearance in Paris, six years after the composer’s death in 1908, courtesy of a brave new experiment marshalled by that chameleonic impresario Sergei Diaghilev.So you may well have seen the opera staged before: I remember a trapeze-artist cockerel for Scottish Opera, the old tsar kitted out in a purple suit doing a Yeltsin dance for the Royal Opera. Yet unless you’ve come Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Before curtain-up on the opening night of this revival of Penny Woolcock’s production of The Pearl Fishers, ENO's head of casting arrived on stage with a microphone. No doubt delightful company in person, he was an unwelcome sight here. Sophie Bevan had a stomach bug, he explained – the disappointment was palpable. But she'd be bravely singing anyway – grateful applause broke out. In the end, our goodwill was not called upon in the least, since Bevan's voice in her debut as Leïla was as strong and agile as ever.As the overture plays this production offers its most visually arresting moment, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Before Boris Eifman’s second visit to London this week, ballet lovers who missed the divisive Russian dancemaker last time round will have been weighing up the merits of a punt on a ticket. If they were basing their calculations on reviews, I imagine their mental reasoning went as follows. Against: Eifman’s ballets send many English-language dance critics into tail-spinning, virtuosic displays of vitriol (based on genuine dislike: Eifman makes one colleague “want to stand on her chair and howl.”) For: other critics like him; Russian audiences apparently love him. Plus, controversial might Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
When three good choreographers can’t get a ballet right, there must be something wrong with either the story or the music. In the case of the Prince of the Pagodas (a Poirot mystery waiting to be written, that, but I digress), it’s hardly the music: Benjamin Britten’s gamelan-leavened, melodic score, his only for a ballet, is compelling. Of course, it hardly serves up Classic FM-worthy five-minute flower waltzes à la Tchaikovsky, Adam, Minkus et al, but then neither does Prokofiev’s Cinderella and that has no problem getting produced.So, story then. Both John Cranko in his 1957 original and Read more ...
David Nice
If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves. Because it doesn’t happen often in opera that all the elements combine for total musical theatre that stuns: in this case, two great voices – Rebecca Evans’s soprano and Iestyn Davies’s countertenor – at what sounds like the peak of their stylish careers, an orchestra under the exceptional Christian Curnyn totally fused with what’s happening on stage, and an ingenious set from Read more ...