It seems somehow wrong to come away from a Don Giovanni feeling a bit noncommittal about the whole thing. It’s the sort of opera that should raise you from your seat – that should fire and inspire – but this performance, directed by Jonathan Kent, never truly got off the ground. The set – a sort of Rubik's Cube of a building designed by Paul Brown that opened in ever more ingenious ways, and morphed from chapel to party house to graveyard – was clever and satisfying and mirrored the steady disintegration of the characters as we progressed.
opera reviews
igor.toronyilalic
David McVicar's revival production of Handel's oratorio-cum-opera Semele isn't terribly clever or beautiful or impressive, or fecund with ideas or detail or emotion. But it does work. It does tell the story. And what brings colour to its initially rather pasty, unappealing face, and fire and heft to its anaemic belly, is sex and - best of all for those of you who will only be able to catch it in concert at the Barbican next week - one of the most impressive Handel casts I've heard for years.
David Nice
Yes, it's still him all right. Hovering around a disputed seventysomething and bouncing back from a serious operation, Plácido Domingo puts into seemingly smooth gear that beaten-bronze voice in a million and still sounds like the tenor we've known and loved for decades. Which might be a problem in a classic Verdi baritone role, beleaguered Doge of Genoa Simon Boccanegra, were grizzled authority not the keynote. That works, but if only Domingo's towering stage presence had been better harnessed in the umpteenth revival of what was never a very human production by Elijah Moshinsky. This is a singular opera which can seem slow to kindle and then a bit stagey if no truth is to be found in its many confrontations. And sadly there was very little of that last night.
Peter Culshaw
The question remains why Mozart never finished Zaide. One immediate reason is he got a well-paid commission for Idomeneo, and Zaide was written on spec. Another reason, at least on last night’s evidence, was that it seems as likely he didn’t finish it because he realised he had a turkey on his hands. On a beautiful summer's evening when, if you wanted drama or entertainment you could be (to take a few examples) watching the World Cup or Wimbledon or the fabulously operatic Muse at Glastonbury, you would in any case have to have a pretty compelling night in the theatre to compete. This turgid gallimaufry wasn’t it.
The question remains why Mozart never finished Zaide. One immediate reason is he got a well-paid commission for Idomeneo, and Zaide was written on spec. Another reason, at least on last night’s evidence, was that it seems as likely he didn’t finish it because he realised he had a turkey on his hands. On a beautiful summer's evening when, if you wanted drama or entertainment you could be (to take a few examples) watching the World Cup or Wimbledon or the fabulously operatic Muse at Glastonbury, you would in any case have to have a pretty compelling night in the theatre to compete. This turgid gallimaufry wasn’t it.
stephen.walsh
Watching and hearing this revival of WNO’s now eight-year-old production of Verdi’s Rigoletto, it’s hard to remember he composed it only a year or two before La Traviata, that most psychologically believable of all his operas. In Rigoletto nothing makes sense: the hunchback’s pretty daughter, her apparently willing incarceration, Rigoletto’s hoodwinking (literally) into helping her abduction, her final self-sacrifice – all palpable nonsense. Yet the piece never seriously fails.
igor.toronyilalic
You'd be forgiven for thinking that an opera that - in all seriousness - climaxes to the words, "Farewell, little table. You seemed so large," might need a small, but firm, slap in the face. But you'd be quite wrong. Manon is really quite froth-free. Its operatic brothers-in-arms are Lulu and The Rake's Progress, charting as they all do the rise and tumbling fall of an innocent at the hands of a corrupting city; its allusive musical ways reach out to Debussy and Puccini. The point is, it's a modern work.
stephen.walsh
The beautiful gardens of Garsington Manor might seem an ideal setting for Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its ilex groves, its miniature forests of pyramid yew, and its paths overhung (o’er-canopied?) with climbing roses. So it’s a mild shock to confront on the actual stage what looks like a huge attic store-room littered with beds, chucked in at all angles, a few lamps, various items of bric-à-brac, and, upstage centre, a large C. S. Lewis-style wardrobe through which, in due course, characters enter and exit.
David Nice
Only those who think the burnt-out question of Wagner and the Nazis can still be brought to bear on his operas could be disappointed by Richard Jones's life-enhancing new production. Not a swastika in sight, not a hint of anti-semitic caricature for the fallguy who was never intended for it in the first place, only affirmation of the opera's central message that great art can bring order and understanding to society.
alexandra.coghlan
Anyone hoping to take refuge from last night’s football fever in the solemn halls of the Royal Opera House would have scored something of an own goal. Heading the bill for OperaShots – a trio of new operas staged in the intimate Linbury Theatre – was Jocelyn Pook’s Ingerland, an operatic meditation on the beautiful game. Framed by shorter works from Orlando Gough and Nitin Sawhney, the evening was a chance for three established composers to have a “shot” at opera for the first time. With Gough promising not so much an attempt as a “shot across the bow of opera”, we prepared ourselves for something pretty provocative.
David Nice
It's official, like it or not: director Katie Mitchell is the high priestess appointed to make plain the ways of ancient family sacrifice to modern man. She had the high ground of collaborating with composer James MacMillan on his stunning new opera The Sacrifice, based on a Mabinogion revenge saga; but the jury's still out over whether her National Theatre retelling of ancient Greek bloodgrudge wasn't rather too doggedly echoed in her production of Handel's Jephtha. Besides, when that came to ENO, there were basic problems of blocking and operatic stagecraft. They loomed large again in this modern-dress presentation of the young Mozart's bursting-at-the-seams classical drama. Yet another strong company show, the last of many this season, struggled to project its musical message across the emotional and physical distance imposed by the staging.