Royal Opera
Festen, Royal Opera review - firing on every frontWednesday, 12 February 2025
So the Royal Opera had assembled a dream cast, conductor (Edward Gardner) and director (Richard Jones). The only question until last night was whether composer Mark-Anthony Turnage would be at his remarkable best. His operatic journey has been... Read more... |
Phaedra + Minotaur, Royal Ballet and Opera, Linbury Theatre review - a double dose of Greek mythMonday, 10 February 2025
Greek myths are all over theatre stages at the moment, their fierce, vengeful stories offering unnerving parallels with events in our modern world. The latest such project is a pithy double bill of opera and dance, both halves (though the first... Read more... |
Jenůfa, Royal Opera review - electrifying details undermined by dead spaceThursday, 16 January 2025
This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won him the role of Antonio Pappano’s successor as Music Director, which he takes up at the beginning in the 2025/6 season.From... Read more... |
The Sound Voice Project, Linbury Theatre review - an art installation that has strayed into an opera houseSaturday, 16 November 2024
What does it mean to have a voice? And what does it mean to lose it? Those are the questions the award-winning Sound Voice Project has explored – through research, collaboration and live performance – since its beginnings in 2016. The latest... Read more... |
Trouble in Tahiti/A Quiet Place, Linbury Theatre review - top cast plays unhappy familiesSaturday, 12 October 2024
Most of us have been there: an impasse in a marriage, a bereavement in a dysfunctional family. Leonard Bernstein certainly had when he composed Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, basing the unhappy couple on his own parents and even the incipient problems... Read more... |
Eugene Onegin, Royal Opera review - the heart left coldWednesday, 25 September 2024
Emotional truth is elusive in Tchaikovsky’s “lyrical scenes” after Pushkin’s verse-novel. Overstress every feeling, as conductor Henrik Nánási did last night, and you leave some of us in the audience feeling manipulated. Play it cool, which is what... Read more... |
La traviata, Royal Opera review - a charismatic soprano in a serviceable revivalTuesday, 10 September 2024
Later this autumn Richard Eyre’s La Traviata celebrates its 30th birthday. Not bad going for the director’s first ever foray into opera – a genre he admitted holding an “unreasonable prejudice against”.And perhaps that’s the secret to this Royal... Read more... |
Carmen, Royal Opera review - strong women, no sexual chemistry and little stage focusSaturday, 06 April 2024
When will the Royal Opera give us a totally electrifying Carmen, rather than just a vocally perfect Carmen (as Aighul Akhmetshina surely is)? Supposed firebrand Damiano Michieletto’s production is mostly tepid after Barrie Kosky’s half-brilliant... Read more... |
Giant, Linbury Theatre review - a vision fully realisedSaturday, 09 March 2024
Abandon hope of the human comedy so precisely charted in Hilary Mantel’s related historical fiction The Giant, O’Brien, prepare for a vision of outsized body and soul revealed in sleep, and your patience will be rewarded. Sarah Angliss’s haunting... Read more... |
Elektra, Royal Opera review - moral: don’t wait too long for revengeSaturday, 13 January 2024
Those were happy days back in 2014 when, justifiably flushed with the success of the Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde revival, director Christof Loy, music director Antonio Pappano and soprano Nina Stemme mooted possibly the toughest role challenge... Read more... |
Best of 2023: OperaWednesday, 27 December 2023
Choosing a limited best seems almost meaningless when even simply the seven operatic experiences I've relished in the run-up to Christmas (nothing seasonal) deserve a place in the sun. But in a year which has seen Arts Council devastation versus... Read more... |
Jephtha, Royal Opera review - uncomfortable sacrifice oratorio not seismic enoughTuesday, 14 November 2023
“Tell me,” The West Wing’s President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) asks of a right-wing TV host who uses the Bible to call homosexuality an abomination, “I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21.7… What would a... Read more... |
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