wed 22/05/2013

Opera reviews, news and interviews

Falstaff, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Kimon Daltas

In this revival of Richard Jones's 2009 production, the action has been very effectively shifted to post-war Windsor with Sir John Falstaff (Laurent Naouri) as down-at-heel gentry maintaining delusions of superiority, rubbing up against an ascendant middle class. Nannetta and Fenton are presumably about to play their part in the baby boom. Period features abound, from chintz and mock Tudor to soda siphons, troupes of Brownies and a Victrola cabinet.There are witty little touches, which add to...

Ariadne auf Naxos, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Edward Seckerson

The Major-Domo promises fireworks during the Prologue of Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Ariadne auf Naxos. Katharina Thoma, the director of Glyndebourne’s new staging, drops a bombshell - actually several bombshells. Glyndebourne’s wartime history (as a refuge for evacuees) would seem to have chimed with the darker implications of the opera within - namely, the Composer’s opera seria of the title. So here we are, in these darkest of days, occupying the house of a wealthy nobleman for sure but not...

 

La donna del lago, Royal Opera

David Benedict

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-...

theartsdesk Q&A: Kate Lindsey and Katharina...

David Nice

What’s the perfect Glyndebourne opera? Mozart, of course, must have first and second places with Le nozze di Figaro – Michael Grandage’s lively...

Albert Herring, Opera North

Graham Rickson

Staging Britten’s third opera in the round in a small performance space of the Howard Assembly Room makes complete sense. Albert Herring’s supporting...

The Pirates of Penzance, Scottish Opera, Theatre Royal, Glasgow

David Nice

Gilbert and Sullivan need a lighter director's touch in this musically strong new production

Wozzeck, English National Opera

Edward Seckerson

New production of Berg's masterpiece is as upsetting as it is thrilling

Don Carlo, Royal Opera House

David Nice

Near-perfect cast for Verdi's epic masterpiece crowned by the stupendous Anja Harteros

La bohème, English National Opera

Alexandra Coghlan

A Bohème of rare musical excellence that will please cynics and softies alike

Mangan, Royal Academy Opera Students, BBCSO, Denève, Barbican Hall

David Nice

Hands on hearts for the sadness and profundity in two French fantasies

Monteverdi Choir, London Symphony Orchestra, Gardiner, Barbican Hall

David Nice

Too much earth and not enough sky in two Greek-inspired masterpieces by Stravinsky

Juan Diego Flórez and friends, Barbican Hall

Alexandra Coghlan

With a little help from his friends Juan Diego Flórez gives his finest London recital yet

BBC Proms 2013: Ring operas for a fiver each

David Nice

The world's biggest music festival runs the gamut as ever, from Bach to Fazer, England to Azerbaijan

'For him, maestro was an ironic term': Sir Colin Davis remembered

theartsdesk

We ask some great classical performers what the conductor meant to them. And add our own memories

Nabucco, Royal Opera

David Nice

Domingo now graces the cast as the Assyrian king brought low, but the production still palls

Sir Colin Davis: 'He simply knew how Mozart should go'

Humphrey Burton

The distinguished broadcaster and biographer Humphrey Burton pays tribute to the conductor who became his brother-in-law

theartsdesk in Lyons: A contemporary opera house taking a bold approach

Alexandra Coghlan

An opera festival of justice/injustice serves out its sentence in style

Sunken Garden, English National Opera, Barbican Theatre

Alexandra Coghlan

21st-century opera so busy being digital that it forgets to be an opera

Newcomers triumph at BBC Music Magazine Awards

David Nice

Malaysian pianist steals the show performing three pieces from her CD 'Musical Toys'

10 Questions for Writer David Mitchell

Jasper Rees

The author of 'Cloud Atlas' has turned to modern opera

The Firework-Maker's Daughter, Opera North, Touring

Graham Rickson

Dazzling, low-fi stage effects paired with an attractive, sophisticated score

Orpheus, Classical Opera Company, Page, London Handel Festival

Roderic Dunnett

Concert hall revival of a Telemann operatic masterpiece

Die Feen, Chelsea Opera Group, Queen Elizabeth Hall

David Nice

The 20-year-old Wagner's uninspired but ambitious first opera strongly cast and conducted

The Gospel According to the Other Mary, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, Barbican Hall

David Nice

Adams's opera-oratorio mixes queasy evangelism and profound Passion to masterly ends

Imago, Glyndebourne Opera

Roderic Dunnett

A densely dramatic new community opera from Orlando Gough

Simon Boccanegra, English Touring Opera

Roderic Dunnett

A consistent and cohesive production of Verdi's problem opera

Written on Skin, Royal Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

New George Benjamin opera is skin-deep

Phaëton, Les Talens Lyriques, Rousset, Barbican Hall

David Nice

Lully's lyric tragedy about the fall of the Sun's son deliciously animated by supreme stylists

The Threepenny Opera, LPO, Jurowski, Royal Festival Hall

David Nice

Three star performances and a great band in this mixed line-up for Brecht and Weill's hybrid

Footnote: a brief history of opera in Britain

Britain has world-class opera companies in the Royal Opera, English National Opera, Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera and Opera North, not to mention the celebrated country-house festival at Glyndebourne and others elsewhere. The first English opera was an experiment in 1656, as Civil War raged between Cromwell and Charles II, and it was under the restored king that theatre and opera exploded in London. Henry Purcell composed the masterpiece Dido and Aeneas (for a girls' school) and over the next century Handel, Gluck, J C Bach and Haydn came to London to compose Italian-style classical operas.

Hogarth_Beggars_Opera_1731_cTateHowever, the imported style was challenged by the startling success of John Gay's low-life street opera The Beggar's Opera (1728), a score collating 69 folk ballads, which set off a wave of indigenous popular musical theatre (pictured, William Hogarth's The Beggar's Opera, 1731, © Tate). Gay built the first Covent Garden opera house (1732), where three of Handel's operas were premiered, and musical theatre and vaudeville flourished as an alternative to opera. Through the 19th century, London became a hub for visiting composers and grand opera stars, but from the meshing of "high" and "popular" creativity at Sadler's Wells (built in 1765) evolved in time a distinct English tradition of wit and social satire in the "Savoy" operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

In the 20th century Benjamin Britten's dramatic operas such as Peter Grimes and Billy Budd reflected a different sort of ordinariness, his genius driving the formation of the English Opera Group at Aldeburgh. English opera, and opera in English, became central to the establishment, after the Second World War, of a national arts infrastructure, with subsidised resident companies at English National Opera and the Royal Opera. By the 1950s, due to pressure from international opera stars refusing to learn roles in English, Covent Garden joined the circuit of major international houses, staging opera in their original languages, with visiting stars such as Maria Callas, Tito Gobbi and the young Luciano Pavarotti matched by home-grown ones like Joan Sutherland and Geraint Evans.

Today British opera thrives with a reputation for fresh thinking in classics, from new productions of Mozart, Verdi and Wagner landmarks to new opera commissions and popular arena stagings of Carmen. The Arts Desk brings you the fastest overnight reviews and the quickest ticket booking links for last night's openings, as well as the most thoughtful close-up interviews with major creative figures and performers. Our critics include Igor Toronyi-Lalic, David Nice, Edward Seckerson, Alexandra Coghlan, Graham Rickson and Ismene Brown.

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