WNO
Sweeney Todd, Welsh National OperaFriday, 09 October 2015
If nothing else, Stephen Sondheim’s best-known work will put you off pies; it will put you off barbers; and it may in the end put you off Sondheim. Popular though it seems to be with planners and programmers, it’s sluggish and heavy going as drama... Read more... |
Orlando, Welsh National OperaMonday, 28 September 2015
It’s almost impossible to imagine what a Handel opera performance can have been like in London in the 1730s, when Orlando first appeared. The audience came primarily to hear their favourite singers: and these must have been sensational, if not... Read more... |
I Puritani, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 12 September 2015
Whatever one may feel about Bellini’s music, it’s hard to think of him as in any sense a political composer. So you could almost hear the hearts hit the floor when the curtain went up – or rather was as usual already up – on the opening of Bellini’s... Read more... |
Listed: Essential Operas 2015-16Tuesday, 01 September 2015
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... Read more... |
Pelléas et Mélisande, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 30 May 2015
Debussy completed only one opera (though he started plenty), but it’s the most perfect work imaginable, not only in sheer musical refinement and narrative precision, but in psychological penetration and above all in that exact grasp of the... Read more... |
Peter Pan, Welsh National OperaSunday, 17 May 2015
I must have been one of the few in Saturday’s audience for Richard Ayres’s new opera who had never seen Barrie’s play or read the book, so I’m unable to judge how faithfully it renders the original – in case that matters. Somehow one knows the... Read more... |
Die Walküre Act 3, WNO, Koenigs, Wales Millennium Centre, CardiffMonday, 27 April 2015
There’s a lot to be said for concert performances of Wagner. Not only are you spared the post-prandial lucubrations of aspirant directors – the moonmen and the fighter pilots, the jackboots and the biogas installations. But it’s possible to... Read more... |
Hansel and Gretel, Welsh National OperaSunday, 22 February 2015
After 16 years one might expect a revival of a repertory opera like Hansel and Gretel to come up with a dusty look and frayed edges. But Benjamin Davis has done a brilliant job pumping the life back into Richard Jones’s memorable but intricate 1998... Read more... |
Moses in Egypt, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 04 October 2014
So easily parcelled up as a master of opera buffa, Rossini is a composer who constantly surprises by the emotional and intellectual range of his best work. William Tell, which opened WNO’s current season three weeks ago, is a major progenitor of... Read more... |
Carmen, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 20 September 2014
Popularity is all very well, but it can be a poisoned chalice. Braving the umpteenth revival of Carmen at WNO (original directors Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser, revival director Caroline Chaney), I began to experience that sense of weariness that... Read more... |
William Tell, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 13 September 2014
A few months ago, while looking something up about Liszt’s piano piece “Chapelle de Guillaume Tell,” I discovered to my horror that William Tell – like Robin Hood – may never have existed. Even the apple, like the one in Genesis (there is no apple... Read more... |
The Fall of the House of Usher, Welsh National OperaSaturday, 21 June 2014
The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s mistier tales, and although it has been turned into opera a few times, there are obvious difficulties. Debussy struggled for a decade to materialise a drama out of its haunting, neurotic... Read more... |
