ROH
David Nice
If you don’t believe in the angels, or at least the good, of Don Giovanni, don’t stage it. Mozart may well be telling us, as Kasper Holten partly seems to be, that the antihero is a void, a mask-wearer and a creature of thrusting appetites, on his way to the abyss. But he also gives the young avengers, bent on punishing the libertine for his murder of Donna Anna’s father, music of such diamond-cut beauty that only someone bent on the text alone would ignore its force (whether we happen to be more compelled, dramatically speaking, by the rake’s enigma is irrelevant). To shed all but the last Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Massenet had just two lingering thoughts about Manon when he wrote his memoirs in 1910, a quarter-century after the opera's first performance. First, he enjoyed reminding himself how many times it had been performed (a staggering 763 by the time he finished the memoirs). He also stressed that the choice of the singer to play Manon herself was crucial, needing an "artist who suited this role just as I wanted, and who could represent perfidious and dear Manon with all the heart that I had placed in her," with the right "qualities of vocal seduction".In both these respects, this Covent Read more ...
judith.flanders
It has been said that Mozart, so prodigiously talented so young, seemed to be merely a vessel through which God, or the music of the spheres, or whichever higher being one chooses, channelled the sounds of heaven. So, too, sometimes, does Balanchine appear to be a vessel through which music is channelled, to take solid form in front of our eyes. And never more so when the music in question is Tchaikovsky.Jewels can be a tricky piece to get right. In less than 90 minutes, it covers 150 years of dance in three plotless acts: mid-19th century French Romanticism, via Fauré, for Emeralds; American Read more ...
David Nice
Is anyone else sick of creepy brotherhoods skewering the transcendent in Mozart’s and Wagner’s late operas? Both Sarastro’s cult and the company of the grail are in sore need of change - "fresh blood" would be an unfortunate term under the circumstances - when we first encounter them. But both Simon McBurney’s production of The Magic Flute at English National Opera and now Stephen Langridge’s unleavened Royal Opera Parsifal suggest that these are sects not worth joining or saving. If I were Wagner’s hero in this unholy hall, I’d get the hell out of there and call the police.Langridge, who Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
You could hardly ask for a better cast than the one assembled for this short run of Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House: Simon Keenlyside in the title role, Karita Mattila, John Tomlinson, Mark Elder in the pit. And at a top price of £65, with many tickets going for much less, this is quite the bargain – not least because the marquee names absolutely nail the performance.Keenlyside jitters and stiffens as Wozzeck gets progressively consumed by imagined and real-life torments, while harnessing the strange lyricism of his vocal lines. Mattila, her voice full and perfectly controlled, brings a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
In this classical anniversary year we’ve had masses of Wagner and Verdi, plenty of Britten (and still more Britten) but not much has been heard of 2013’s other birthday-boy, the notorious Carlo Gesualdo – prince, priest, composer and murderer. Best known for the extraordinary chromatic contortions of his madrigals and the stark, chiaroscuro beauty of his Tenebrae Responsories, the legend of his private life still dwarfs all. And it’s this story that provides inspiration for Salvatore Sciarrino’s 1998 chamber opera The Killing Flower.An unaccompanied female voice pierces the blackness with Read more ...
David Nice
First fanfare had to be for the Royal Opera House’s main gambit in Verdi bicentenary year, staging its first ever Sicilian Vespers 158 years after the Paris premiere. Any of Verdi’s operas from Rigoletto onwards deserves the red carpet treatment, and this unwieldy epic, with its opportunistic grafting of a melodramatic plot on to the Palermitans’ massacre of the French in 1282, has more than enough vintage music to be worthy of anyone’s close attention. What’s more, Antonio Pappano is surely the best opera-house music director in the world to reveal its colours and beauties, and he rose to a Read more ...
judith.flanders
The opening night of the autumn season brings a gala first night, Carlos Acosta’s staging of Petipa’s Hispano-Russo-Austro-Hungarische castanet-fest, Don Quixote, with starry leads (Marianela Nuñez and Acosta himself), a very obviously expensive new production courtesy of West End musical designer Tim Hatley (Shrek and Spamalot), and an amped-up re-orchestrated score from conductor Martin Yates.Acosta (pictured below by Johan Persson) has previously mounted shows of his own – Tocororo, A Cuban Tale was the most prominent – but Don Q is his first outing in the classical repertoire, and for the Read more ...
David Nice
“Strike again,” cries Elektra as her brother stabs their mother to death. It’s third strike lucky for this Covent Garden production of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s singular mythic horror. In previous manifestations of designer-director Charles Edwards’ rather over-freighted but ever improving staging, conductors Semyon Bychkov and Mark Elder, as well as top-less soprano Lisa Gasteen and the more nuanced but sometimes underpowered Susan Bullock, missed the heart of the matter. Known sensation Andris Nelsons and the much-anticipated Christina Goerke were much more likely to hit Read more ...
David Nice
Revivals, especially at Covent Garden, too often wrong-foot high expectations. This one should have shone, with two known treasures among the cast (Lucy Crowe and Luca Pisaroni), an experienced Mozart conductor in John Eliot Gardiner and a handsome-enough David McVicar production supervised by its original director (sorry, “Sir John” might slip off the tongue, "Sir David" does not; but when was the honours system ever logical?) Yet while Michael Grandage’s profoundly human Glyndebourne Figaro dazzled as well on tour as at its opening and, by all accounts, in this year’s festival, too much of Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi left it till last to be most itself, to dance a ballet that is truly of its blood, its seed - its closing on Alexei Ratmansky's The Flames of Paris will leave much happiness in the memory to override the problematic productions of classics, the unidiomatic Balanchine and the awful backstage events. Here at last, in a work by the most gifted of recent Bolshoi directors, you met on stage young people who dance, who act, who love the theatre, fresh in their performing, skilled in their means, open-hearted in reaching the audience, and loved right back.The previous night the visiting Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The Bolshoi Theatre reopened in late autumn 2011 after a problematic six-year refurbishment said to have cost a tidy billion dollars, many times its original estimate thanks to corruption - it needed a corker of a ballet premiere to pop the eyes of a cynical Russian public, and it set upon a new staging of The Sleeping Beauty. This was also problematic, as three years earlier it had been promised to the then ballet director Alexei Ratmansky, who had soon afterwards resigned his job, wretched and miserable with the corrosive relationships within the theatre. And it was reassigned to the Read more ...