Puccini
Christopher Lambton
Picture the scene. A vast steel gazebo covers a nondescript parking lot next to an industrial unit in Glasgow. With a clear plastic covering, it is the most rudimentary of shelters, sides open to admit the roar of the M8 and the wailing of sirens, carried on a keen autumnal breeze. About 100 people, all wearing masks, are seated at a random scattering of mismatched but carefully distanced chairs and tables, loosely grouped around a central stage. Around the perimeter, a scattering of tents, shipping containers, and flatbed lorry trailers, one of which is furnished to look like a dilapidated Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Wigmore Hall audiences don’t usually roar. But when a star soprano who has already made her mark at the world’s major opera houses pays a visit, they do. This was the Albanian-born and now New York-based soprano Ermonela Jaho’s debut at the hall, an event which also marked the opening of the 50th anniversary year of Opera Rara, with whom Jaho has an extremely fruitful collaboration. The concert had been fitted into the Wigmore Hall’s programme at relatively short notice and sold out quickly.The moments that brought on the most vociferous baying from the packed house were opera extracts, Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini's and Abbé Prévost's glitter-seduced Manon Lescaut might have been inclined to linger longer in the salon of dirty old man Geronte if he'd served her up not his own madrigals but Bach's music for various harpsichords and ensemble. Five such concertos gave us a morning of pure pleasure in the light-filled, packed-to-the-rafters surroundings of the wonderful Queen's Hall (★★★★), a sober though appreciative audience sitting and standing around the artists in the converted church like a Lutheran congregation, yet were all but eclipsed by the seductive force of Puccini's first great love Read more ...
David Nice
"Waiting is always wearisome," declare the socialites as glitter-and-be-gay Manon Lescaut receives in the home of her nasty old "protector" Geronte. Despite the numerous sugar-plums Puccini weaves into his first fluent operatic masterpiece, waiting is very wearisome in the first half of Karolina Sofulak's new production for Opera Holland Park. Anticipation that glorious soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn will flourish is eventually rewarded; but laryngitis two weeks ago has left her not in best voice. And her love interest, tenor Peter Auty as Des Grieux, seems worried about catching it, since he Read more ...
David Nice
Would Verdi and Puccini have composed more non-operatic music, had they thrived in a musical culture different to Italy's? Hard to say. What we do know is that they both became absolute masters of orchestration – Puccini rather quicker than Verdi, living as he did in an entirely post-Wagnerian era. Verdi left us one great mass, the Requiem, Puccini a youthful and honest expression of the liturgy as well as other early pieces he mined for Manon Lescaut and La bohème. It made a pretty, occasionally stirring climax to an evening which could have done with an absolute masterpiece.One such, even Read more ...
graham.rickson
Stravinsky acknowledged that his orchestra for The Rite of Spring was a large one because Diaghilev had promised him extra musicians (“I am not sure that my orchestra would have been as huge otherwise.”) It isn’t huge in Opera North’s production (★★★★★), and for practical reasons they're using the edition arranged by Jonathan McPhee in 1988 for a standard pit band. I expected to be underwhelmed, but, as conducted by Garry Walker, it sounded terrific, most of the sonic thrills emerging unscathed.This staging, a collaboration between Opera North and Leeds’s Phoenix Dance Theatre, marks the UK Read more ...
Robert Beale
The Royal Northern College of Music’s December opera production was the useful double bill of Suor Angelica and Gianni Schicchi from Puccini’s Trittico. I say useful, because the former employs a women’s chorus (and, briefly, a full one) plus 16 named roles, and the latter a cast of 16 – an opportunity for a big opera department to put plenty of its singers on the stage: it’s one they’ve taken before.This time there was the difference that the eponymous characters were sung by RNCM artists in residence Linda Richardson and Quentin Hayes – a first, as far as I’m aware, and one that gave poise Read more ...
David Nice
Her special claim to fame was the most luminous pianissimo in the business, but that often went hand in velvet glove with fabulous breath control and a peerless sense of bel canto line. To know Maria de Montserrat Viviana Concepción Caballé i Folch, born in Barcelona 85 years ago, was clearly to love her. I never did (know her, that is), and I only saw her once, in a 1986 recital at the Edinburgh Festival. By then she was careful with her resources, but the subtly jewelled programme delivered on its own terms.There was a glimpse of the famous good nature, too. Here it is in an unexpected Read more ...
graham.rickson
Puccini’s Tosca isn’t a subtle work, and this, Opera North’s fourth production since the company’s founding in 1978, is occasionally too loud and crude. But it’s undeniably powerful. Edward Dick’s 2017 Hansel and Gretel left me a little nonplussed, but this Tosca is miles better, a colourful update which manages to juggle plenty of schlock with sound artistic nous. He’s helped by conductor Antony Hermus, making his Opera North debut and securing some terrific, full-throated orchestral playing, much of it at the upper end of the dynamic scale.Nab a seat near the front of the stalls and Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Puccini’s heroines and the rough treatment he hands out to them have come in for plenty of opprobrium over the years. But just occasionally they fight back on his behalf in the person of an outstanding singing actress; and this is exactly the case with Glyndebourne’s initial offering of their new season, a revival of Annilese Miskimmon’s Madama Butterfly, first seen as part of the company’s tour in 2016, and given a somewhat dusty reception on The Arts Desk.The production itself, in Nicky Shaw’s designs, seems not to have changed much. There remains the modish and apparently pointless update Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Opera-lovers: if you’ve finally had enough of the wheelchairs and syringes, the fifties skirts and heels, the mobile phones and the white box sets, and the rest of the symbolic paraphernalia of the right-on modern opera production, pop along to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and catch up with Michael Blakemore’s quarter-century old staging of Puccini’s great warhorse. Blakemore’s Tosca (with designer Ashley Martin-Davis) ticks every box on the traditionalist’s questionnaire, from the plausible (if not accurate) Sant’ Andrea della Valle of Act 1 to the only slightly rearranged Castello Read more ...
David Nice
Remastered they may be, but the 20 live operas recorded here between 1949 and 1964 vary soundwise from clean at best to atrocious, with all the caprices of stage noise and audience participation seemingly acceptable at the time (so often there's the shouting prompter who seems duty bound to cue everything – even interjecting a loud libiamo! in the silence before the voices kick in for La traviata's Brindisi). But you don't have to be a diehard Callas fanatic to realise the value of this extraordinary treasury. On stage she always gave that little bit extra, complete with sobs in the Read more ...