Let's begin at the end. Isn't the nuns-to-the-scaffold scene which concludes Poulenc's ultimate testament of doubt and faith the deepest, most heart-wrenching finale in all opera? It even has the edge over Richard Strauss's Rosenkavalier trio and duet, in that the singers often end up in tears as well as the audience. If my eyes were dry at the end of the Guildhall School's valiant staging, that's not because the production lacked the necessary clarity, imagination and motion, nor was it due to any dearth of good voices. But clearly something wasn't quite right.
opera reviews
alexandra.coghlan
At 25 years old, Jonathan Miller’s Mikado may be more Grande Dame than ingénue, but it still has a Charleston kick in its step and a shimmy in its pearls. Styled and stylised, chic and slick, it's as far from the operetta’s ubiquitous am-dram incarnations as from the Japan of the original. Yet just as the Minimalist decor and monochrome palette of an Art Deco interior prove unforgiving to the smallest hint of dust or casual clutter, so the sharp lines of this production provide little cover for the relaxed paunch or middle-aged spreadings of a revival.
stephen.walsh
Verdi’s Il Trovatore, the WNO season brochure assures us, “is Italian opera at its most passionate and full-blooded”. But you could sit through this revival of Peter Watson’s seven-year-old production and overlook the fact. Always understated (to put it kindly), with age it has retreated further into its shell. The singers face front and largely ignore one another; the soldiers seem to have taken orders from the latest tottering Middle Eastern tyrant not to fire on their own people. There are no flames to trouble Azucena’s conscience; no blood, not much passion.
igor.toronyilalic
Look past the cum buckets, the trucker pussy, the fuck you-ing and cunt-hungry beasting (librettist Richard Thomas's words, not mine), the mountainous titties and cheap promotional candy that had been confected for the legions of rubbishy celebrity opera virgins scattered in the Royal Opera House audience at last night's world premiere and you will find a profoundly conservative, and mostly not unattractive, new opera in Anna Nicole.
igor.toronyilalic
Some of you will know that Wagner and I haven't been seeing eye to eye of late. Last year's Tannhäuser I believed was the end of the road for the two of us. Not quite. With one of the most celebrated Wagner productions of the past two decades returning to the English National Opera last night - Nikolaus Lehnhoff's Parsifal - I decided to give him a final chance. My whole mind, body and soul was primed to repel it, yet I came out almost blubbing.
stephen.walsh
Those WNO regulars who remember the company’s last Fledermaus (directed nine years ago by Calixto Bieito) with a shiver of horror can rest assured that its replacement contradicts it at almost every point. John Copley, past-master of Texttreue (truth to the text, or at least its spirit), does not rummage around in Strauss’s frothy masterpiece for a critique of modern man, does not transplant it to Merthyr Tydfil or turn it into a rugger-club knees-up, does not coarsen the text or doublecross the music.
Instead, he accepts it as it is: a middle-class fantasy of the high life with Vienna as its simulacrum, an immaculate study in vapid, delicious pleasure, a joke at the expense of expensive jokes and, above all, a dazzling score that never lets up from first note to last.
Copley perhaps updates the setting a touch, though in a work whose dramatis personae are constantly in and out of costume, it’s hard to be sure. In any case the stars of the evening, in my book, are the designers, Tim Reed and Deirdre Clancy, and the lighting designer Howard Harrison, who provide a visual treat that never strays into the vulgarity modern stagings find so tempting in this piece. Bankers are (naturally) invoked in the Pountney/Hancock translation as Eisenstein’s likely fellow inmates in the local jail; but happily their tastes in décor are mostly left alone. The Eisensteins are parvenus, of course, and their suburban villa shows it. But the bored, fun-loving millionnaire Prince Orlofsky (vividly played and sung en travesti by Helen Lepalaan from Estonia) knows how to party in style; is no oligarch; won’t, one feels, be buying football clubs: his palace offers a restrained, semi-exterior setting for a range of genuinely exquisite costumes, subtly lit, and even the prison is the sort of establishment where one might not mind meeting one’s banker, at least if one could avoid the ghastly Frosch (Desmond Barrit).
The evening’s other main feature is the conducting of Thomas Rösner, a Viennese in a piece that can die without style. In his hands the music lilts and sparkles, and the orchestra dances brilliantly to his tune. For the singers, in translation, he could perhaps give a shade more time in the quicker numbers – Orlofsky’s champagne song, or Eisenstein’s initial Terzetto. Rösner, I guess, is used to Viennese singers who have this music in their pocket. But this will come, even in the Land of Song.
The WNO cast is clever, musicianly and highly watchable, thanks not least to Stuart Hopps’s neat choreography, which goes well beyond the regulation of formal dance. Joanne Boag shines as Adele, buxom but agile and clear-voiced in her laughing couplets; and while Nuccia Focile struggles to get Rosalinde’s Csárdás across in this big theatre, she is excellent elsewhere, including in her scenes with the spoof tenor Alfred (Paul Charles Clarke), who sings almost as much Verdi as Strauss and insists on her calling him Alfredo.
Opposite her, Mark Stone is a stylish Eisenstein, enough of a baritone, as Rösner points out in his programme-book interview, to project the rather wordy numbers Strauss gives him, but lyrically tenorish when required. Alan Opie is a witty Frank, a Hapsburg stuffed uniform who breaks into a two-step when instructed by the music. David Stout presides as a just sufficiently sinister Falke, spectacularly transformed into a bat for the finale, but warm enough in the Brüderlein ensemble, a number which typifies the essential pointlessness but irresistible charm of Viennese operetta.
David Nice
Metcentric New Yorkers tend to think an opera hasn’t achieved classic status until it arrives at their vast inner sanctum. Whereas other cities worldwide know that the inimitable Peter Sellars production of grand opera’s last masterpiece (to date) has become a virtual brand since its 1987 Houston premiere. John Adams's first, and biggest, opera was an obvious here-to-stay triumph at the Edinburgh Festival the following year, and its strengths become more apparent with the passing of time.
graham.rickson
Based on a short story by Gogol, Alexander Medvedev’s libretto for Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Portrait was originally conceived for Shostakovich. It was subsequently passed to Weinberg, who finished his opera in 1980. It’s a bleak, Faustian tale of a struggling artist who buys the eponymous painting, after which material success is mirrored by moral collapse.
stephen.walsh
Dragon Opera (or Opera’r Ddraig, if you insist: they don’t) is in every sense a young company, founded a mere two years ago, and based at Cardiff’s Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. Its singers, directors and orchestral players are nearly all recent or current students at the college, the company is run by recent graduates, and its funding is set up by a student collective called RepCo, run from the RWCMD, and parent also to a couple of student orchestras and a community choir.
alexandra.coghlan
“Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light – were all like workings of one mind.” Writing almost a century after Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Wordsworth was still contemplating the essential duality of the sublime – that greatest of Enlightenment legacies. Rationalism, order and science, we are reminded, are only the admissible part of an age that would also beget the sinister fantasies of Romanticism and the Gothic – those most pernicious of bastard offspring.