opera directors
Richard Bratby
Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. Anne Boleyn is number two on the list, so anyone who can remember even that much Tudor history can guess that Donizetti’s Anna Bolena is not going to end well. The overture has hardly ended before we’re told that Anne’s star is falling, and it’s not exactly a spoiler to reveal that our social climbing heroine is destined (in the words of a better librettist than Donizetti’s collaborator Felice Romani) for a short sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block. We already know where we’re going. The success of the opera Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Five years ago this Kneehigh Theatre production caused a stir with its vibrant modern retelling of John Gay’s 18th century satirical classic, The Beggar’s Opera. It’s currently on tour again and it’s easy to see why a revival was greenlit. It’s a bawdy story of political corruption with no sweet ending, not, in fact, that far from popular boxset dramas such as The Wire or Broadwalk Empire, but with a whole lot more silliness and songs.Set in a grimy, dream version of post-World War II austerity (there’s a running joke about the exoticism of bananas), the plot centres on super-criminal Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Selfish, cunning, cynical, the older generation has screwed up the world with aggression abroad and dishonesty at home. Can their children make it good again? This family drama of transgression and reparation threads through Idomeneo, the opera that Mozart – who had his own troublesome issues with both biological fathers and father-figure patrons – premiered in Munich in 1781. As it lifts the (by then) somewhat musty conventions of opera seria to formerly unimagined heights in a plot about returnees from the Trojan War and the cost their offspring pay for the elders’ bloodstained vanity, Read more ...
Richard Bratby
Mid Wales Opera makes small-scale touring look fun – even when you suspect that, behind the scenes, it really isn’t. Barely 24 hours before this performance of their current production of Ravel’s L’heure espagnole, and 11 dates into their current 16 date tour, their Torquemada, Peter van Hulle, was invalided out. Companies this size, and working on this budget, can’t carry understudies. So up stepped tenor Joseph Doody to sing the role from the wings and up, too, stepped the company’s artistic director (and this production’s director) Richard Studer, who mimed the role on stage with such ease Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
After exhausting years of financial and artistic crisis-management at the Coliseum, English National Opera urgently needed an ironclad, feelgood success. This season’s opener, a somewhat idiosyncratic take on Strauss’s Salome, was unlikely to fit that bill. Despite a couple of niggles, however, I’m happy to report that James Robinson’s full-throttle production of Porgy and Bess steers the rocky boat of St Martin’s Lane home in splendid style. Surprisingly, George Gershwin’s 1935 score – with brother Ira’s, and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s, lyrics – has not played in its full operatic glory on Read more ...
David Nice
"When the new god approaches, we surrender, struck dumb". Especially if, for the singer of those words, popular entertainer Zerbinetta, the “new god” takes the shape of same-sex love. Director and designer Antony McDonald locates the real “mystery of transformation” with which Richard Strauss’s house-poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal was so infatuated in the coup de foudre between the not-so-fickle coloratura soprano and another woman as the (usually teenage and putatively male) Composer. That, along with everything else in this stylish, beautifully sung and finely acted production, has an Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What a fabulous score Pelléas et Mélisande is, and what a joy to be able to hear it in a concert performance without the distraction of some over-sophisticated director’s self-communings. Well, if only. What last night’s Prom in fact served up was a kind of abstract of Stefan Herheim’s Glyndebourne production, semi-staged by Sinéad O’Neill without its organ-room setting and all that that entailed, but with a great deal of its dramaturgical clutter still intact. This was emphatically a performance for the radio. I was in the Albert Hall, but I suspect the orchestral playing will have Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Much as I love Strauss’s Ariadne in its final form, I have a sneaking nostalgia for the original version (attached to Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme), which had Zerbinetta and her companions popping up after the final love duet and gently letting out some of its gas. Even in Alan Privett’s sparkling new production for Longborough, the too protracted revised ending threatens to die on its feet, and is kept alive only by the fine singing of the two principals, Helena Dix and Jonathan Stoughton, neither of them exactly sprightly actors, and by superb orchestral Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a truism that history is written by the victors, but nowhere in classical music is the argument made more persuasively than in the legacy and reputation of Charles Gounod. In a year in which you can hardly move for Bernstein and Debussy-related events, a year in which even Couperin and Parry are getting a good showing, as well as the too-often-neglected Lili Boulanger, the 200th anniversary of the composer’s birth is passing all but uncelebrated in the UK.It’s a sign of just how far out of fashion Gounod has fallen that none of the major British houses is taking the opportunity to stage Read more ...
David Nice
You can always be sure of impeccable casting and spirited playing as Ian Page takes his Classical Opera through Mozart year by year. Just don't expect more than the glimmer of genius to come in 1768, though. It doesn't matter in those admirable showcase programmes highlighting the young Amadeus alongside more mature voices of the year in question. A three-act opera is rather more a vexation to the spirit, though. If the composer had no more than a few flashes of genius in his pre- and early teens, the libretto for La finta semplice could have been written by an average 10 year old ( Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Brilliant and innovative though it is in many respects, The Flying Dutchman is by no means a straightforward piece to stage. It’s an odd, sometimes uncomfortable mixture of the genre and the epic. At Sadler’s Wells in the sixties they had a little ship and a big ship that hove into view, a fishing village, sailors with tankards and striped shirts, and girls at looms. At Bayreuth in the eighties Harry Kupfer set the whole piece in a lunatic asylum, which solved all dramaturgical problems, if at some psychological cost. Now, at Longborough, Thomas Guthrie and his designer, Ruth Paton, have Read more ...
Michael Chance
Out of the blue comes a phone call. A freelance career is based on those to a certain extent. Certainly mine has been. But this one was a bit different. “Would you come and talk to us about the way forward?”. I soon learnt that what this actually meant was, “would you launch and run a new opera festival for us?”Singers as a bunch are inveterate gossips and effortless complainers. The hierarchy of targets usually starts with the incompetence of their agents, then quickly the unpleasantness of a recent conductor or director, before inevitably slagging off successful colleagues. Oh, don’t we Read more ...