Scottish Opera
Christopher Lambton
For the gentleman next to me in the Festival Theatre, this was his second outing to see Rusalka. At the production premiere earlier this month in Glasgow, he had been “blown away” by Dvořák's lyric masterpiece. Given half a chance, I would go back to Edinburgh for the second and last performance in this run; not only because this is a brilliant, beautifully judged performance, but also because the opportunity might never come again. Rusalka was last staged in Scotland by a Czech company in 1964. Will we really have to wait until the 2060s to see another?The neglect of Rusalka is puzzling. Read more ...
David Kettle
In the end, it’s all about the oranges. They adorn the programme that accompanies Harry Fehr’s intelligent new production of Handel’s Ariodante for Scottish Opera. More importantly, they’re prominent in designer Yannis Thavoris’s clinical steel-and-glass set, growing on carefully groomed bushes in six neat tubs, placed meticulously below warming light bulbs, protected from the gales and snow drifts outside by a wall of glass.They're a simple but highly effective metaphor in Fehr’s deeply unsettling production, which relocates Handel’s opera – originally set in an unrecognisible, age-old Read more ...
theartsdesk
September is upon us and it’s nearly time for the new season. English National Opera’s Artistic Director John Berry may have left the building but his enterprising legacy lives on in a 2015-16 season that looks on paper as good as any in the past 20 years; what happens after that is anyone's guess. Still, there shouldn’t be too much grief that ENO Music Director Edward Gardner has moved on, since his successor Mark Wigglesworth already has a fine track record with the company.Over at the Royal Opera, it’s business as usual with Antonio Pappano and at least one rarity to match Szymanowski’s Read more ...
David Kettle
"The darkness deceived me," sings Leonora in Act I as she mistakenly rushes into the arms of the Count di Luna, rather than those of her beloved, the mysterious troubador Manrico who’s been serenading her for nights on end. Seeing Robert B Dickson’s sepulchral lighting in Scottish Opera’s semi-new production of Verdi’s melodramatic shocker Il trovatore – an updated version of the company’s 1992 staging – you can understand why. The production’s Caravaggio-esque gloomy depths and ominous, looming shadows (used to particularly grotesque and unsettling effect in the famous "Anvil Chorus") soon Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Even at the tragic heart of Janáček's Jenůfa there is ambiguity. As the Kostelnička or village sacristan takes her stepdaughter Jenůfa’s baby boy outside to drown it in the icy river, you cannot quite be sure whether she is motivated by pride, fear or her love for Jenůfa. In this poised new co-production by Scottish Opera and Danish National Opera, there is no doubt that she is driven by love. Murderous it may be, and it will nearly destroy her, but her compassion cannot be denied. Likewise, when Laca, jealous of Jenůfa's love for another man, slashes at her face with his newly Read more ...
David Nice
Of all the Savoy operas, this merry clash of pirates, policemen and a Major-General flanked by an entire chorus of loving daughters finds Sullivan most in tune with the mid-19th century Italian opera he so lovingly spoofs. So why can’t Martin Lloyd-Evans’s production be similarly fleet-footed with Gilbert’s resourceful, literate lyrics and whimsical plotting? Lloyd-Evans has at his disposal high-quality operatic soloists, a brilliant young chorus and a witty designer. All are squandered. The problem isn’t any clever uprooting into another time and place; after all, Scottish Opera, in Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Popular operatic love stories by Puccini, Wagner and Mozart dominate the regional scene in 2012, but key talents like producer Tim Albery in Leeds, Lothar Koenigs in Cardiff and David McVicar in Glasgow all promise significant stage experiences. Opera NorthHandel’s Giulio Cesare (NEW PRODUCTION), Leeds Grand Theatre 14 Jan-16 Feb 2012; Nottingham Theatre Royal 23 Feb; Salford Quays The Lowry 1 Mar; Newcastle Theatre Royal 9 Mar; Dublin Grand Canal Theatre 14 Mar. The epic love affair between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, dazzlingly composed for two outstanding female singers. Pamela Helen Read more ...
graham.rickson
Unpleasant feelings of confinement and claustrophobia hit you when the curtain rises after Beethoven’s disconcertingly jolly overture; one small room is visible on stage, framed by black curtains. The sun shines oppressively through the barred windows, and the characters look constrained, physically awkward. After the occasionally over-the-top visuals of several recent Opera North productions it’s good to watch something so clean and uncluttered. The beauty of Tim Albery’s production, originally staged by Scottish Opera in 1994, is its unfussiness and clarity – nothing happens on stage that Read more ...
David Nice
A glittering, gaudy surface and an epic, sometimes disturbing underbelly are what many of Klimt’s canvases and Richard Strauss’s autobiographical bourgeois comedy of marital misunderstanding have in common. It was the main idea of Wolfgang Quetes’s Scottish Opera extravaganza to bring those mythic resonances in harmony with the realist conversation-piece aspect of the opera. But you don’t do Intermezzo without a capricious heroine of huge charisma like Glyndebourne charmers Elisabeth Söderström and Felicity Lott. Any British opera-goers heard of Anita Bader? You will now.Bader makes very much Read more ...
graham.rickson
To a bewitching, shimmering prelude, a back-projected astronaut plants a Czech flag on the lunar surface. So begins one of those evenings where you skip out of the theatre grinning and promising yourself that you will buy tickets for all your opera-disdaining friends.First performed in Prague in 1920, Brouček is the Cinderella among Janáček’s mature operas. Based on stories by the popular nationalist writer Svatopluk Čech about a drunken everyman, the opera had a troubled composition history. Janáček began writing the work in 1908, eventually finishing it in 1918, collaborating with several Read more ...