ROH
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 ...
David Nice
God-sent sea monsters and divinely ordained human sacrifices don’t wash well with opera updated. The favoured contemporary take on the post-Trojan War myth of Mozart’s Idomeneo, which may even have originated in the last Covent Garden production 25 years ago by a fitfully brilliant Johannes Schaaf, has been to put a populace at risk from natural disaster and pestilence. Clearly the programme was expecting something of the sort, with its images of Hurricane Katrina. But no, for director Martin Kušej, the only monster is the state.Chuck out a cosmic dimension in favour of power struggles, Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
Madness is a favourite trope of opera, less so of ballet. There’s Giselle, but her insanity lasts only a few minutes. There’s Kenneth MacMillan’s delusional Anastasia, who believes she's the daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, but the advent of DNA testing destroyed the story’s credibility. In his Mayerling, Prince Rudolf’s drug habit muddies the waters, likewise the brown ooze in Arthur Pita’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It takes a brave choreographer to tackle mental illness head-on, not least when it's his first full-evening commission for the Royal Ballet.And there’s Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
This morning, those who follow ballet on both sides of the Atlantic might be feeling a bit like the male soloists at the beginning of Ashton’s Scènes de Ballet: turning their heads sharply, almost pantomimically, from side to side. Over there, in New York, Wendy Whelan, the prima ballerina retiring after a 30-year career with City Ballet, made her farewell in a programme heavy on modern masters Wheeldon and Ratmansky, including a world première. Over here, in London, the Royal Ballet performed a quadruple bill of works by Frederick Ashton, its revered and adored founder choreographer, the Read more ...
Heppy Longworth
Even before I stepped into the Royal Opera House, it was clear to see that it had been transformed for the opening performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Anna Nicole. A red carpet outside; the pervasive smell of popcorn within; the stage curtains, usually red, now a gaudy shade of purple: the opera house clearly had a case of All Things American.This exciting atmosphere was upheld throughout the opera, which was unlike anything I had ever seen. Its theme is the life of the world’s first reality TV star, Anna Nicole Smith, whose short life was filled with controversy (marrying a billionaire Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Royal Opera House is on fire this month. Not literally (unless someone knocks over the flaming braziers outside) but with the varied illuminations of the Deloitte Ignite Festival, co-curated by the Royal Ballet and Minna Moore Ede of the National Gallery. The theme this year is Myth, and specifically Leda's rape by Zeus in swan form, and Prometheus's gift of fire to humanity. Artworks dealing with these two stories, or with swans and fire more generally, are to be seen all over the building, which this weekend was open during the day for a variety of public events, from film screenings to Read more ...
Ismene Brown
This was the most eagerly anticipated programme of the Mariinsky visit - something old, something borrowed and something new. The old, that colourful fairytale of Stravinsky’s lush, melodious youth, The Firebird; the new, a recent acquisition by the Londoners’ favourite Russian, Alexei Ratmansky; and the borrowed, something from English ballet legend, Frederick Ashton’s Marguerite and Armand, once kept under glass with the Fonteyn and Nureyev myths, but eventually released from the museum by Sylvie Guillem and Nicolas Le Riche a decade ago.The Ashton has now suffered the fate its Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The ballerina claque wars that generally accompany visits here by the Mariinsky Ballet are raging particularly feverishly this year, but it all falls silent when Uliana Lopatkina makes one of her increasingly rare appearances. So much noise is focused on legginess or hip flexibility of these size-zero ballerinas, and yet the Mariinsky knows more than any other company in history that it is not body but mind that matters in the final analysis. Their luminous historical legend Galina Ulanova was nothing to look at physically, until she started dancing.Lopatkina once set the new bar for Read more ...
David Nice
Can it really be 12 years since Antonio Pappano inaugurated his transformative era as the Royal Opera’s Music Director conducting Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos? Christof Loy’s production seemed so radical at the time. We were put off our guard by seeing opera stars in the backstage Prologue preparing for an 18th century opera seria – to be famously interrupted by common or garden song and dance in poet-librettist Hofmannsthal's ingenious misalliance – but what we actually got in the "performance" was a modern Ariadne slumped on a dressing table in a hotel room the walls of which only suggested Read more ...
David Nice
Puccini’s racy first masterpiece, like its successor La bohème, should feel like an opera of two halves – the first full of youthful exuberance, the second darker and ultimately tragic. The contrast here, alas, was between vivacious performers and a sombre, sometimes confused updating by Jonathan Kent which too often dwarfed or zapped their better efforts.On the minus side, any contemporary rendering of a slight-ish melodrama adapted from Abbé Prévost’s 1731 novel goes against the grain of the depicted attempts to send our pleasure-loving young heroine first into a convent and then, for Read more ...
David Nice
The big message of The Woman Without a Shadow, brushing aside the narrower, moral majority preaching that you’re incomplete without children, seems clear: fulfillment can’t be bought at the cost of another’s suffering. Yet the path towards that realization in this "massive and artificial fairy-tale", as an increasingly alienated Richard Strauss called it, is strewn with magnificent thorns in both his complex, layered music and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s elaborate symbolic libretto.Stagings tend to have gone either for a series of pretty, unconnected fairy-tale pictures to throw light and colour Read more ...
theartsdesk
Even more deserving of the sobriquet “the beautiful voice” than Renée Fleming, the natural successor who virtually copyrighted it, Kiri te Kanawa was one of the great sopranos of the 20th century. With those big, candid brown eyes and bone structure she’s still a beauty, as the images of her cameo role in the Royal Opera’s La Fille du régiment underline. The voice now – well, as I wrote in my review of Monday’s opening, it’s what you’d expect of a 70 year old with form. Last night was the big birthday with Downton Abbey butler Carson (Jim Carter) wheeling on the cake for that other stately Read more ...