ROH
Thomas H. Green
Pet Shop Boys are never shy of producing stylishly conceived fan mementos. Coming not long after Faber & Faber’s hardback collection of Neil Tennant’s lyrics, this four-disc set is just such a slice of lovingly rendered memorabilia. After well over three decades in the game – but one since they had a Top 20 hit song – the duo retain a devoted following, ever eager to invest in whatever they’re up to. In the spirit of full disclosure, I am one such, and this review – of a film of a concert I’ve already reviewed on theartsdesk – should be read in that light. After all, who else is buying it Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
David McVicar may seem too gentle a soul for the lurid drama of Strauss's Salome, but his production, here returning to Covent Garden for a third revival, packs a punch. He gives us plenty of sex and violence – or at least nudity and blood – but finds the real drama in the personal interactions, the increasingly dysfunctional relationships that eventually doom all involved. That drama is well served by this revival cast, making for some engaging stagecraft. The musical standards are more mixed, however, with only one truly world-class performance, and from a character who loses his head far Read more ...
David Nice
It may not have been the best year for eye-popping productions; even visionary director Richard Jones fell a bit short with a tame-ish Royal Opera Bohème, though his non-operatic The Twilight Zone is something else. Instead there's been time to reflect on what makes a true company. While English National Opera, after the end of Mark Wigglesworth's short but unsurpassable tenure, showed what a shortened season looks like – the London Coliseum no longer "the home of ENO", Bat out of Hell taking over from June to August – others continued to blaze a trail forward.Top prize for showing Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The choreographer Kenneth MacMillan was a man of many modes and moods, and it’s tempting to wonder how many more he might have revealed had he not been felled by a heart attack at the age of 62. Two retrospective programmes staged this week – continuing a short season marking the 25th anniversary of his death – show him by turns at his most majestic, most profound, most frivolous and most confrontational. The “difficult” ballet – his last, The Judas Tree, an allegory featuring hideous sexual violence, a lynching and a suicide – straddles both bills in a piece of brave programming that doesn’t Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
This is the sixth revival of David McVicar’s production of Die Zauberflöte at Covent Garden since its debut in 2003. It was heard most recently in 2015, and is modestly described in the Royal Opera’s own publicity as a “classic”. Having not seen it until now, I enjoyed the singing and was impressed with the set and lighting, but I found the staging in some ways neither fish nor fowl.Last year, Alexandra Coghlan for theartsdesk found Simon McBurney’s production at English National Opera to be “revelatory” in its inventive theatricality. Here McVicar, and revival director Thomas Guthrie, dip Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
"But is any of this normal?," asks poor Beatriz at the end of Act One. Of course not. She and 14 other grand creatures are crossing the space of an aristocratic drawing-room from which, they are coming to realise, there is no escape. At the same time, it’s completely normal. This is opera.What appalling fun Thomas Adès has with the business of opera in The Exterminating Angel, given its UK premiere last night by the Royal Opera. Its conventions, faults, virtues, singers, audiences, even conductors: all are skewered by a pen of poison-tipped invention. Imagine chomping your way through an Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Balanchine's Jewels is catnip to dedicated ballet lovers. A homage, faithful and brilliant as only a master could make, to three different styles of choreography and three different national sensibilities, it's as dense, expertly carved and glittering as the gems of the title.It is also plotless, and so presents a signficant challenge to the performers, who must hold an audience's attention for a whole evening without the aid of narrative or emotional material. After all, however beautiful the sight of Royal Ballet dancers in sparkly tutus in the even more sparkly Royal Opera House may be, Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
"My mission is to create new dance with new music and new design that is intimately plugged in to the world we live in today. I am motivated to make contemporary work that speaks of now and that is totally present-tense," Wayne McGregor explains in the programme note for last night's triple bill of his works at the Royal Opera House. It's the McGregor-speak that we have all come to know: a vanishingly tiny message wrapped up in obfuscatory verbiage. I find it increasingly sad that McGregor seems to have become trapped in his own, over-thought, narrative: he has a questing spirit and a curious Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The reception of Kenneth MacMillan's ballet Anastasia has some similarities with that accorded the Berlin asylum patient who some believed to be the lost Romanov Grand Duchess. For supporters who wanted to believe in the fairytale, Anna Anderson's awkwardness, her lack of Russian, her facial dissimilarity to the Tsar's youngest daughter, could all be turned to postive account; her unlikeness became evidence of likeness.In the case of the ballet, its supporters cite its flaws as evidence of its nobility; MacMillan should not be accused of failing, but lauded for having tried at all. The ballet Read more ...
David Nice
Even that most unpredictable of fantasists Nikolay Gogol might have been surprised to find his Nose, wandering far from the face of Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov, sung by a high tenor in an unlikely operatic adaptation of his wackiest story. Give the singing role, as Barrie Kosky does, to another character, and show the giant-sized Nose
– here a boy dancer
– without any token apparel of his supposed high rank before which lowly official Kovalov absurdly grovels, and you miss the point of a vintage scene in Shostakovich's The Nose. Fortunately Kosky has plenty of ingenious riffs Read more ...
David Nice
Prospects hadn't seemed that great for this new Covent Garden Così. Could Semyon Bychkov, powerful earth-and-fire conductor of Richard Strauss's darker operas, possibly find the right proportions of air and water in Mozart? Would German director Jan Philipp Gloger prove better than his Bayreuth reputation? As it happened, the sextet of half-unknown principals never sang less than respectably, and the production had some good ideas, though mostly linked to the look of expensive sets rather than to focused work on the psychology of confused lovers. It was Bychkov who nearly sank the evening. Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
What do women want? Ballet plots are not the best guide, since the main desiderata – a well-paying job, coffee dates with girlfriends, not to die young of a broken heart – are rarely the lot of ballet heroines. Comedies at least tend to have the not-dying part covered, but they often fall down on at least one of two other big requirements: that one's family should be supportive, and that one's romantic partner should not be a chump. Pity Katharina in The Taming of the Shrew, which the Bolshoi presented in London last night in Jean-Christophe Maillot's 2014 production for the company: burdened Read more ...