Royal Opera
Innocence, Royal Opera review - timely, layered drama with almost incidental musicTuesday, 18 April 2023
To create a sensitive and original music-drama around the subject of a school killing is a colossal achievement. Director Simon Stone, set designer Chloe Lamford and novelist Sofi Oksanen’s cutting libretto make Innocence seem like a masterpiece. I... Read more... |
Turandot, Royal Opera review - spectacle and sound wow in this significant revivalTuesday, 21 March 2023
Nearly 40 years old, Andrei Serban’s Royal Opera Turandot feels like a gilded relic (I felt like a relic myself on learning that my writer neighbour wasn’t born when I saw Gwyneth Jones as the ice princess in 1984). Yet so too, outwardly, did... Read more... |
Rusalka, Royal Opera review - ravishing sounds, torpid stagingWednesday, 22 February 2023
Psychological depths in the myth of the water nymph who yearns for the human world, with disastrous results, have led to some unusual settings for Dvořák’s operatic masterpiece on the theme: a nursery, a hotel room (both successful), a brothel (not... Read more... |
Tannhäuser, Royal Opera review - true goodness triumphs in the endThursday, 02 February 2023
It’s always a disappointment when the Venusberg orgy Wagner added in 1861 to his original, 1845 Tannhäuser to suit Parisian tastes gives way to foursquare operatic conventions. Especially so in this revival of Tim Albery’s 2010 production, where... Read more... |
Least Like the Other, Irish National Opera, Linbury Theatre review - the harrowing of Rosemary KennedyMonday, 16 January 2023
This multimedia horror revue gave me heart trouble, which is an odd kind of compliment. Not at first: the assault of abrasive music, the one singer having to leap all over the place vocally, competing with spoken word and information overload, can... Read more... |
Die Zauberflöte, Royal Opera review - classic show but disappointing conductorSaturday, 17 December 2022
“The great thing about this production,” Colin Davis observed in 2003, during rehearsals for its very first run, “is that the director [David McVicar] hasn’t attempted to shock anybody. He has tried to tell the story of The Magic Flute. And... Read more... |
Alcina, Royal Opera review - sharp stage magic, mist over the pitWednesday, 09 November 2022
Handel’s audiences must have taken a very long time to settle – at least an act, to judge from the mostly inconsequential music of Alcina’s first hour. Lovely: we’re on an enchanted isle where puritanical people have been transformed into animal-... Read more... |
Britten Weekend, Snape review - diverse songs to mostly great poetry overshadow a problem operaTuesday, 01 November 2022
In usual circumstances, a fully staged opera and every voice-and-piano song-cycle by a single genius in one weekend would be an embarrassment of riches. The only problem about Britten hitting the heights, above all in setting toweringly great poetry... Read more... |
Aida, Royal Opera review - dour but disciplinedMonday, 26 September 2022
No gods, ancient Egyptian or otherwise; no sinister priest along the lines of Russia’s antichrist Patriarch Kiriil, sending soldiers to their deaths with the promise of heaven. Military ritual under what looks like a Russian/Chinese flag prevails in... Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Royal Opera review - vibrant youth and vocal beautyThursday, 30 June 2022
Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, a stunning Elsa in this Royal Opera season's revival of Wagner’s Lohengrin, was the lure to sit through Jan Philipp Gloger's Mozart Così again (the title, by the way – "All Women Do It" – belies the complexity applied... Read more... |
Samson et Dalila, Royal Opera review - from austerity to excess, with visual rigour and aural beautyFriday, 27 May 2022
Words and situations are one-dimensional, but the music is chameleonic, if not profound, and crafted with a master’s hand. What to do about Saint-Saëns’s Biblical hokum? In Richard Jones’s new production, the end justifies the means, with persecuted... Read more... |
'How that music was created remains to me a complete mystery': John Tomlinson on fellow Lancastrian Harrison BirtwistleFriday, 20 May 2022
It has been a difficult couple of years for us in the world of opera, losing several of our most respected and admired colleagues who have inspired us over several decades. The names of Harry Kupfer, Graham Vick, Bernard Haitink come immediately to... Read more... |
