opera directors
alexandra.coghlan
It’s all there in the first few bars of Britten’s music – that unsettling tension between beauty and familiarity, and eerie, undefinable otherness. Those cello glissandi might end in glowing major chords, but the tentacle-like slides throw them into doubt. We’re no longer in a binary world of major or minor, but a harmonic landscape of infinite possibility. Netia Jones’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream delights visually in shades of grey, a gorgeous shadow-play of a production, but when she drained her designs of colour she also stripped it from the drama, leaving Britten’s opera a wan reflection Read more ...
David Kettle
What to pair with Bluebeard’s Castle? It’s always a dilemma for opera companies. Something lightweight, even comic, provides contrast but also risks trivialising Bartók’s dark, symbolist drama. Something equally brooding risks submerging the audience into an evening of endless gloom. For its collaboration with Glasgow-based experimental theatre company Vanishing Point, however, Scottish Opera has come up with a bold, ambitious solution: to pair Bluebeard’s Castle with a brand new piece, written expressly to complement it.The work in question is The 8th Door, created jointly by Scottish Opera’ Read more ...
Richard Bratby
It’s the kitchen of a Thai-Chinese-Vietnamese fast food restaurant. The onstage orchestra wear sweatbands and T-shirts, and a red work surface stretches across the stage. As the four chefs take the stage, the clatter of pans and knives is first noise, then a rhythm, then an overture of sizzling, clanging, chopping and hissing sounds that spreads throughout the whole orchestra. Vegetables are sliced, pans brandished and, sitting out front, as an escaped slice of courgette rolls wonkily downstage, is a young Chinese cook, wailing with toothache. No question, Peter Eötvös knows how to create an Read more ...
David Nice
How ironic that English National Opera turned out possibly the two best productions of the year after the Arts Council had done its grant-cutting worst, punishing the company simply, it seemed, for not being the irrationally preferred Royal Opera. And while 2015 has been as good as it gets artistically speaking for ENO, 2016 may well see confirmation of the first steps towards its dismantling by a short-sighted management – for what is a great opera house without a big chorus or a full roster of productions, both elements under threat?Meanwhile, let’s celebrate the positive. Both the outgoing Read more ...
stephen.walsh
It’s almost impossible to imagine what a Handel opera performance can have been like in London in the 1730s, when Orlando first appeared. The audience came primarily to hear their favourite singers: and these must have been sensational, if not unduly dedicated to the dramatic verities they were supposed to be representing: castrati like Senesino and Farinelli, sopranos like Cuzzoni and Faustina (who once came to blows onstage, presumably trying to upstage one another). Nobody cared much about plot or character, but they loved the magical effects: Zoroastro whisking Orlando away in a flying Read more ...
theartsdesk
September is upon us and it’s nearly time for the new season. English National Opera’s Artistic Director John Berry may have left the building but his enterprising legacy lives on in a 2015-16 season that looks on paper as good as any in the past 20 years; what happens after that is anyone's guess. Still, there shouldn’t be too much grief that ENO Music Director Edward Gardner has moved on, since his successor Mark Wigglesworth already has a fine track record with the company.Over at the Royal Opera, it’s business as usual with Antonio Pappano and at least one rarity to match Szymanowski’s Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with creepy glissandi emanating from the pit like nocturnal spirits. There is no mention in the score – this is an educated guess – for the chirrup of swifts and the hoot of wood pigeons, but this avian chorus joined the overture anyway at last week’s dress rehearsal in the open-air courtyard of Théâtre de l'Archevêché. Perhaps director Robert Carsen ordered them in as an atmospheric extra. An Aixtra, if you will.Carsen’s Dream has returned to Aix-en-Provence, at the Festival d'Art Lyrique where it began all the way back in 1991. Remarkably given its Read more ...
David Nice
It’s a brilliantly sunny January afternoon amidst a general drama of rain at an industrial park outside Aix-en-Provence, and members of a production team are gathering for the first time in the back yard of the festival’s rehearsal studios. Some have met earlier, and three of the five singers who’ll be arriving shortly know each other thanks to the connections already made through the European Network of Opera Academies. But it’s a journey into the unknown with ENOA’s fifth anniversary co-production, which will only reach its proper beginning in tonight’s Aix premiere, and hopefully develop Read more ...
David Nice
Having been bowled over by the total work of art English National Opera made of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg on its first night, I bought tickets immediately afterwards for the final performance. So I’m off tonight to catch the farewell of what has been an unqualified triumph for the company. Yet only last Thursday an unsolicited email arrived from Amazon Local – there’s no stopping them, it seems – offering tickets for this very show at 40 per cent discount.Now, it’s bizarre that, given the high levels of Wagnerolatry in London, any of the composer's operas doesn’t sell out before Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Søren Nils Eichberg’s new opera Glare is advertised as a “taut” thriller. It’s actually a short thriller. Big difference.The question of whether or not opera – a medium that wouldn’t win any prizes for sprinting – can successfully pull off a thriller – a genre that lives and, more often, dies in its dramatic agility and lightness of foot – is a very real one. I’ve never seen it succeed yet, but would be delighted to be proved wrong. Glare, unfortunately, is not that proof.We find ourselves in the kind of dystopian near-future that only exists on the operatic stage. You know it’s a Read more ...
graham.rickson
You’d expect a regional opera company to focus on the core repertoire in these economically challenging times. Happily, Opera North’s La traviata is a new staging and not a weary revival. Alessandro Talvi’s production doesn’t take many risks and shouldn’t offend anyone, but the whole is beautifully designed, well-acted and handsomely sung.The one surprise comes as Verdi’s hesitant, restrained Prelude steals in, and we think we see Hye-Youn Lee’s Violetta gazing at a full moon. It's actually a wonderfully creepy projection made by video designer Gemma Burditt. It's as if we're staring down the Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
If you only ever listened to opera from recordings, you might overlook the fact that it's as much theatre as it is music. In the opera house on the night, it's all well and good for the orchestra to play the score and the singers to sing their parts, but on top of that you have to allow for costume changes, move the scenery, adjust the lighting and make sure you get all the right people on and off stage at the appropriate moments. It's what makes opera the living, breathing, sometimes splendidly chaotic spectacle it is.It was a strange sensation, then, to spend some time in the orchestra pit Read more ...