The German soprano Diana Damrau has had the role of Violetta Valéry in La Traviata in her sights for a very long time. As she has explained in interviews, seeing the Zeffirelli film of the opera, with Teresa Stratas in the title role, as a 12-year old was a decisive moment in making her want to become a singer. That was 30 years ago. Now, as the pre-eminent high soprano in the world, she is performing the role in several leading opera houses. Last night she made her debut as Violetta at Covent Garden.Damrau's musicality and security of vocal line are spellbinding. It is impossible to imagine Read more ...

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the new indoor Jacobean theatre at The Globe, is an absolute jewel of painstaking historical research and craftsmanship. It is small, seating around 350, and with its thrust stage lit by around 100 candles (with electric light only on the musicians’ gallery in this performance), it is a challenging space to put on an opera, but also a uniquely atmospheric one.It many ways this Royal Opera/Shakespeare’s Globe co-production is experimental, with everyone involved having to learn from scratch how to work within these limitations, and also what opportunities for Read more ...

A baby's brain is polished off by a throbbing welter of maggots. A field of sheep are on fire. A screaming child whose hands have been tied to a kite is flying out over the North Sea. How do you make an opera out of any of this? The answer of course is you don’t. You leave this kind of thing to cinema or the novel. Opera is - contrary to popular belief - extremely bad at spectacle, especially if the aim is to terrify. Horror has never had much of a look-in as a genre in the art form. So it was always going to be a challenge for composer Ben Frost and librettist David Pountney to transfer Iain Read more ...

A stage performance in any art form communicates through sound and motion. A photographer's task is to capture the dramatic experience in the silence and stillness of the 2D image. In the worlds of ballet and opera, none does it with more commitment to truth and drama than the great Laurie Lewis. To mark the end of the 2012-13 season, we present 25 images selected by the photographer exclusively for theartsdesk. They comprise a snapshot of the last nine months of work witnessed by audiences at the Royal Opera House, Sadler's Wells, the London Coliseum, the Barbican and beyond. There's even Read more ...

Revivals are for a conductor to show off some voices he’s discovered, do some role debuts, develop some careers, and as far as the production's concerned pour new wine into old bottles. There was some good new wine in this revival of Elijah Moshinsky's 22-year-old production. The Abkhazian soprano Hibla Gerzmava was the shining beauty, doing her first Amelia, with a sterling new tenor voice coming from the American Russell Thomas. Thomas Hampson made his house debut in the role of pirate-turned-Doge Simon Boccanegra, and Dimitri Platanias - a previous Rigoletto in the house - debuted as his Read more ...

Britten’s coronation opera, paying homage less to our own ambiguous queen than to the private-public tapestries of Verdi’s Aida and Don Carlo, is not the rarity publicity would have you believe, at least in its homeland. English National Opera successfully rehabilitated it in the 1980s, with Sarah Walker resplendent as regent. Phyllida Lloyd’s much revived Opera North production gave Josephine Barstow the role of a lifetime, enshrined in an amazing if selective film. The real questions, then, were why choosy visionary Richard Jones agreed to stage Gloriana, and whether he would have fun at Read more ...

If you were new to contemporary opera, you might think it was forbidden for modern works to be funny. Tragedy is still the default setting for major commissions. You only get serious money if you have serious thoughts and serious music, it seems. At the Royal Opera, the policy is to stage unfunny, ancient buffas on the main stage and sharp, modern ones in the Linbury Studio Theatre. Gerald Barry’s The Importance of Being Earnest is the latest.The concert premiere last year was as close to an overnight smash hit as it is possible to get in opera. The three-act adaptation was snapped up by Read more ...

I mean, really, what is the point of Rossini? That’s actually not as stupid as it sounds. No-one has ever mistaken any of his operas for taut music-drama, and even the best of them are peculiarly difficult to pull off because without first-rate singers, everything collapses. That is, without doubt, not a problem facing the Royal Opera’s new La donna del lago. Trust me: London hasn’t heard such spectacular Rossini singing in decades.Nor, indeed, has London seen a production of this opera since Covent Garden’s 1985 outing which, I’m reliably informed, boasted (good news) the great Marilyn Read more ...

An operatic truism still doing the rounds declares that for Verdi's Il trovatore you need four of the greatest singers in the world. For Don Carlo, his biggest opus in every way, you need six. Nicholas Hytner's Covent Garden staging hits the mark third time around with five, the exception being a very honourable replacement for what would have been an interesting piece of casting. Add to the mix the experienced command of Royal Opera music director Antonio Pappano, supportive of the singers but also attentive to every instrumental detail, and it's as near to Verdian perfection as we're Read more ...

It’s hard to put one’s finger on why George Benjamin’s new opera doesn’t work. It comes to Covent Garden with a wind in its sails. Its outings in Europe have all received high praise. It boasts a classy cast, Martin Crimp as librettist and Benjamin at the helm of the orchestra. The story is a captivatingly horrific medieval morality tale that often goes by the title of "the Eaten Heart story". And there’s little wrong with Katie Mitchell’s production.On one level Written on Skin explores a simple ménage a trois, in which a loveless couple allow a stranger – an illuminator of manuscripts – Read more ...

Flesh-tearing, woman-raping, body-goring brute he may be, but he's misunderstood, that Minotaur. It's a bold argument to make, but this is the contention of Harrison Birtwistle and David Harsent's 2008 opera. They are aided by a surprisingly cuddly performance from John Tomlinson. Head trapped in a prosthetic bull's cranium, hairy belly flopping out, a small stick-on penis standing to attention, Tomlinson is a reluctant and eloquent (if still pretty hideous) half-man, half-beast, soliloquising soulfully on his existential crisis (that of being treated as all-beast when he sees himself as Read more ...

Rolando Villazón at 40 is back on reasonably stylish form, as far as the voice will allow him to go – which is not always up and volume-wise only just as far as the Covent Garden Balcony. John Copley’s Royal Opera Bohème is two years younger than the Mexican tenor. It burns less warmly than the faltering stove in the first act, casts a pall over collective attempts to reanimate the naturalism which is all there in Puccini’s perfect score, and needs a second interval to drag its weary bones back up the stairs to the students’ attic in Act Four.The late Julia Trevelyan Oman’s sets still have Read more ...