ROH
alexandra.coghlan
It’s a good year to be Handel-lover. No sooner have summer runs of Rodelinda (Garsington) and Saul (Glyndebourne) finished than we’re into autumn and Opera North’s Susanna, Giustino at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre, with Ariodante still to come on the main stage.Outings of Susanna don’t come around every day, but Giustino is a proper back-of-the-cupboard rarity – a lighter affair than the big opera serias, short on da capos, and long on supernatural silliness. Throw in a long-lost brother and a bear, and this freely fictionalised account of the rise of sixth-century Emperor Justin I is Read more ...
David Nice
This was always going to be Jakub Hrůša’s night, his first at the Royal Opera since performances of Wagner’s Lohengrin won him the role of Antonio Pappano’s successor as Music Director, which he takes up at the beginning in the 2025/6 season.From the opening rattle of Janáček's rural mill-wheel – the xylophone used in the first production apparently imported from Czechia, such is his sense of detail – via the strings which flame around the Kostelnička’s terrifying decision to give her stepdaughter a better life by drowning the girl’s baby, to the affirmative brass of the great final scene, Read more ...
David Nice
Having all but sunk one seemingly unassailable opéra comique, Bizet’s Carmen, director Damiano Michieletto goes some way to helping out another with so many problems. Not far enough, alas, but the chosen edition, with its reams of recitative (mostly not by Offenbach), doesn’t help. Nor does the theme of women as either dolls, angels or devils. The real Hoffmann did it all so much better.Never mind: this is where we are, so how well are the tales of the poet’s three loves and the frame in which a fourth battles it out with a demon and a muse sung, played and directed? There are some Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
The Mad Hatter gets it about right when he tells Alice: “You’re entirely bonkers… but all the best people are.” Kate Prince takes this line and runs with it in her riotous but surprisingly sweet and often moving hip hop take on Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book, a production now enjoying a 10th anniversary revival, coinciding with a revival of Christopher Wheeldon’s three-act Alice ballet in the Covent Garden main house.The premise of Prince’s show, at first, seems bleak: the familiar characters (the Mad Hatter, March Hare, White Rabbit et al) are inmates of an asylum, ruled by a blinkered and cruel Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
The shadow of Nosferatu hangs heavily over Tim Albery’s powerfully austere staging of Wagner’s opera of desire and damnation, which returns to the Royal Opera House 15 years after it premiered there. Bryn Terfel’s Dutchman is a subtly vampiric figure with his grey clothes and pallid face – an escapee from an Expressionist film hollowed out by his spiritual torment.David Finn’s ravishing lighting design delivers some spine-tingling coups de theatre, whether it’s when looming shadow swallows Miles Mykkanen’s lone steersman lying on the stage, or when light on water creates ripple effects on the Read more ...
David Nice
Choosing a limited best seems almost meaningless when even simply the seven operatic experiences I've relished in the run-up to Christmas (nothing seasonal) deserve a place in the sun. But in a year which has seen Arts Council devastation versus brilliant business as usual where possible, English National Opera – faced with “Manchester or die” – needs the first shout-out for doing everything the moneygivers want it to.That came in the shape of Jeanine Tesori's Blue, with a powerful, unpreachy libretto by Tazewell Thompson, its very originally shaped drama of a young American Black boy Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
At a time when every other theatre is offering an alternative Christmas show, what to make of the Royal Opera House’s first collaboration with Lost Dog, aka director-choreographer Ben Duke, who has come up with the most un-merry topic imaginable? Meet Medea, the vengeful sorceress of Greek myth, who butchered her brother, nobbled her ex’s new bride and murdered her own children. The Wind in the Willows this is not.Remarkably, though, Ruination (what a downer of a title!) succeeds in navigating its tortuous path between violent deeds and lacerating regrets by way of verbal comedy as well as Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it domestic farce and a fever-dream fantasy of a song-cycle: Stravinsky’s Mavra (1922) and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) make for an unexpected double-bill. But, if the two stand slightly awkwardly next to one another, they are both facing in the same direction – each looking back into the musical past.Passacaglias and fugues, love-duets and ensembles, waltzes and folksongs: these are the fragments gathered up by two composers less interested in tearing down the musical establishment at the start of the 20th century than re-purposing it, twisting and skewing the Read more ...
Jenny Gilbert
In a week that saw the Royal Opera House lit up in the colours of the Ukrainian flag and its orchestra playing the Ukrainian national anthem, many theatres and concert halls found ways to express their sympathy for that country’s desperate plight. On Thursday the Barbican, celebrating its 40th anniversary with a performance of Haydn’s Creation by the LSO and LSO Chorus, held a two-minute silence before the start but forgot to tell the audience, who sat there wondering if the soloists were stuck in the tube-strike traffic. At both venues, management spoke of “the humanitarian crisis”, a Read more ...
David Nice
“After black and gloomy night, the sun shines all the brighter,” sings hero Ariodante after a life-threatening bout of jealousy nearly scuppers a royal wedding. There’s a snag in Handel’s dramaturgy: all that sunshine in preparation for the nuptials in Act One isn’t really earned. It probably needs a live audience to beam love and support to the Royal Opera's engaging soloists, but you get the impression they’re trying really hard to an empty house, while orchestra and conductor behind them on the wooden box of a stage, though audibly supportive, show no visible joy in the proceedings.It Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Why is Alexei Ratmansky one of the greatest living choreographers of classical ballet? Well partly because, as last night's performance of The Bright Stream by the Bolshoi at the Royal Opera House proved, he can do comedy. To adapt the famous aphorism for ballet: sententious abstract dance is easy, even Swan Lake is comparatively easy, but doing physical comedy well enough to raise belly laughs from a very smart, high-culture crowd is hard, hard, hard. Ashton could do it; Robbins could do it; and The Bright Stream puts Ratmansky in their distinguished company.Somewhat suprisingly, The Bright Read more ...
David Nice
On the UK's biggest day of shame, it was some relief to tap in to the fury of the Russian people at a much greater national degradation (Napoleon's invasion in 1812, Hitler's in 1941). Though it works even better at the end of the first, "Natasha Rostova" part of Prokofiev's selective homage to Tolstoy, his choral epigraph gave us a good blasting at the start in the firm profiling of WNO forces under their music director Tomáš Hanus. The operatic War and Peace, though, is no more just about big gestures than the novel, and Prokofiev's astuteness in characterisation, which can be as assured as Read more ...