Opera
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 ...
Jasper Rees
This season opener was about closure too. The London Symphony Orchestra was back at the office last night, but this fresh stretch of concerts opened with an opera it has been performing while also acquiring a suntan in Aix-en-Provence. A new cast of singers replaced gaudy costumes and facepaint with elegant evening garb, and semi-acted their roles on the thin strip of forestage not occupied by the massed ranks of the orchestra.The concept of the concert performance has never had more enthusiastic support than at the recent run of seven Wagner operas, amounting to a gazillion hours without Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Last week Anne Boleyn, this week Mary Queen of Scots. Donizetti’s trawl through the Tudor monarchs and their victims was more a recurrent obsession than a systematic exploration. WNO, on the other hand, seem to be implying some Ring-like continuity.Maria Stuarda has a different director in Rudolf Frey, but the same designer, Madeleine Boyd; and court fashion hasn’t changed in the half-century or so since Anne Boleyn went to the block – the same unflattering black skirts and suitings, the same gloomy box interiors. Only Mary defies the monochrome motif with a plaid skirt and knee-length boots Read more ...
David Nice
It’s raining Bunyans, and since Britten’s early American operetta with its sights originally set on Broadway teems with song and invention that can’t be a bad thing. A fortnight after Welsh National Youth Opera commandeered Stephen Fry to voice-over the giant American folk hero of the title, their counterparts in BYO are offering London its first production for 15 years. There were singers at the starts of their careers in that Royal Opera special – remember Susan Gritton and Mark Padmore, anyone? – but not enough: it ought to be a paradise for the young, and here it truly was.In my books, Read more ...
David Nice
This summer, the Royal Albert Hall became the centre of the Wagnerian universe. No one was going to ignore Bayreuth, where Frank Castorf‘s new Ring gave plenty of fuel for column inches; but somehow the singers and the orchestra seem to have got lost there among all the apparently uninterpretable stage paraphernalia. Here there was a unique context for the personenregie, the crucial relationships highlighted in Wagner’s many one-to-ones, as memorable as the spotlight on the music.Sir John Tomlinson, whose thoughts specifically about the Prom Parsifal in which he sang the role of Gurnemanz Read more ...
stephen.walsh
“Let the florid music praise,” sing Britten and Auden in their On This Island cycle; and I suppose we must do as we’re told, though aesthetic duty can be a hard taskmaster. For me it cracks its whip in the three Donizetti operas that, inexplicably, comprise almost the entire autumn repertoire of WNO, while other companies are, ironically enough, celebrating Britten’s centenary. The Welsh have just done, it’s true, an admirable Paul Bunyan, Britten’s first opera. Anna Bolena was not Donizetti’s first, but his thirtieth; and – though it has its moments – it still leaves me hoping nobody revives Read more ...
edward.seckerson
It was too little too late to redress the scant attention gives to Verdi’s bicentenary at this year’s Proms but the “Maltese Tenor” – Joseph Calleja – arrived with an eleventh hour offering of low-key Verdi arias and joining him was the Milanese orchestra bearing the composer’s name. Calleja’s growing legions of fans were much in evidence, of course, more Maltese than Italian flags, but what can they have made of the music stand which came between them and their hero? Five arias, one of which he will have sung a zillion times, and still – despite the presence of TV cameras – the music was Read more ...
David Nice
You may well ask whether theartsdesk hasn’t already exhausted all there is to say about Glyndebourne’s most celebrated Britten production of recent years. I gave it a more cautious welcome than most on its first airing, troubled a little by the literalism of Michael Grandage’s production and the defects in all three principal roles. Alexandra Coghlan was more enthusiastic about this season’s revival but found one crucial shortcoming in Mark Padmore as Captain Vere, the god of the floating kingdom suffering a mortal blow when his repressed resident villain the Master at Arms John Claggart is Read more ...
David Nice
So for one last time this season the impossible colosseum of Albertopolis became the Wagnerian holiest of holies – to be precise, the Cathedral of the Holy Grail - and once again I fell in love with the beast transfigured. Justin Way, the one artist common to all seven Wagner operas as their subtle semi-stager, should be the delegate to receive the award the Proms deserve for highest achievement of bicentenary year; and it seemed right to have Sir John Tomlinson, albeit by dint of another bass’s indisposition, giving his benediction as the witness of a final miracle.No mere ghost of Wagnerian Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Reading through WH Auden’s libretto for Britten’s first stage work – the so-called operetta Paul Bunyan – it’s sometimes hard to decide whether the intention was to participate in the great American dream or to make fun of it. In 1941 both artists were living in the United States and writing for Americans, who famously didn’t take to the work’s blend of folksy condescension and sententious eloquence. The combination is still faintly queasy. Towards the end, a Disneyesque dog and two cats pray for deliverance “from a homespun humour manufactured in the city”, and the mind inevitably strays Read more ...
geoff brown
Jeremy Paxman’s beard may have been a wonder and a talking point for five days, but Michael Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage beats it by almost 60 years. Ecstatic, visionary, energetic music, yes indeed. But, oh, the composer’s libretto! The Magic Flute, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, English folk lore, Greek myths, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Carl Jung’s archetypes of the unconscious mind, wafts of wisdom from the East: all get crammed and overheated in the pot, cooked by someone with a soaring lyrical musical gift but only a talent for awkward verbiage when it comes to writing words. Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
When first seen at Serge Dorny’s Opéra de Lyon in March-April this year, American Gary Hill’s unusual vision of Beethoven’s Fidelio could be recognised immediately as concept opera: drama where a director’s “idea” largely takes over the story. Hill directs (up to a point), and conceived the mesmerising projections that dominated the stage (realised, with jaw-dropping skill, by his technical assistant).Two ideas, culled from fragments of Beethoven’s ponderously-evolved libretto, dominate this production, revived at Edinburgh’s Festival Theatre. First, that events take place on a futuristic Read more ...