Opera
David Nice
Take note of the title, with its “could”, not “must”. “The word ‘must’ is not to be used to Princes,” quoth Good Queen Bess as echoed in Britten’s Gloriana. Yet that was the verb used by New York writer Scott Rose, guest-posting on Norman Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc blog. He declared that hit-and-miss superstar soprano Anna Netrebko, having proved fair game for the drive against Putin’s Nazi-rulebook laws in Russia by aligning herself politically with the regime as a named supporter of his re-election campaign, “must state her position on gay rights in Russia”.The momentum has gathered over in Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s not a crowd-pleaser like Albert Herring, nor wittily fanciful like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or macabre like The Turn of the Screw and certainly not the classic that Peter Grimes has become, and until three years ago Glyndebourne had never even staged Britten’s Billy Budd. But Michael Grandage’s 2010 production was a sea-changer. Aided by Mark Elder in the pit, the director made his operatic debut with devastating simplicity, reminding us all of the power of this uneasy tragedy. This anniversary year the production returns, and though there are some significant changes among the crew of Read more ...
mark.padmore
“O what have I done, o what, what have I done? Confusion, so much is confusion.” So sings Captain Vere in the Prologue of Billy Budd and Benjamin Britten plunges us straight into this confusion from the very first bar as we are left in uncertainty which of two keys - B flat major and B minor - will prevail. Their simultaneous sounding is an apt metaphor for the moral ambiguity which pervades the opera and which is given a dramatic, meteorological presence when the mist descends on the ship in Act 2.I have known and loved Billy Budd ever since seeing it at ENO in 1988 in the Tim Albery staging Read more ...
David Nice
On the one occasion I went to Bayreuth, I made the mistake of seeing The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin after the best of Ring cycles. At the Proms we’ve had a week of serious Wagnerian withdrawal symptoms, so Tannhäuser was never going to feel like too much or too little of a good thing. In any case, this always fascinating if dramatically primitive early clash of sex and religion is shot through with later passages composed in between work on the Ring, most of them included in last night's 1875 hybrid version. And Donald Runnicles is not a conductor to stand in the shadow of Daniel Barenboim Read more ...
Alexander Robinson
I'm a great fan of the BBC, I really am, but it pains me to say that its coverage of the arts on TV often leaves a great deal to be desired. A case in point is Sarah Montague's recent (29 July) HARDtalk interview of opera singer Thomas Hampson, which I watched via the HARDtalk YouTube page.Should opera companies receive public subsidy? Could they do more to diversify the demographics of their audiences? How can opera be made to appeal to modern listeners? These are all valid questions which have been posed before, from Yes Minister to the BBC News website, and which will no doubt continue to Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A lot has changed in the 10 years since Serge Dorny arrived at Lyon Opera. Attendance in a supposedly dying art form has risen to 96 per cent, and no charges of elitism or unfashionable nostalgia have deterred the 25 per cent of Lyon’s audiences who are now under 26 – Europe’s youngest opera-going crowd. But how has Dorny managed this, and at what cost? Is he really the Opera Whisperer or are his innovations just gimmickry, shiny bandages temporarily plugging a fatal wound?It’s a question that UK audiences will soon be able to answer for themselves as Dorny brings his latest and most Read more ...
edward.seckerson
And so Wotan’s ravens flew home and at the twilight’s last gleaming the immortals were consumed by fire and water. All was finally and irrevocably redeemed by the power of love, and the most beautiful of all the leitmotifs in Wagner’s Ring rolled out across the Albert Hall like a benediction. It was a defining moment in Proms history, no doubt, and was greeted with a few moments of perfect - and I mean perfect - silence.After minutes of rapturous applause, Daniel Barenboim spoke spontaneously and without a microphone to the huge capacity audience (pictured below). He talked of the way Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Such has been the justifiable flow of superlatives this week about the Berlin Staatskapelle's Ring conducted by Barenboim, the centrepiece of the BBC Proms' Wagner bicentenary celebration, it would have been easy to forget that the 2013 Proms season contains not just those four, but seven complete Wagner operas.Last night's performance of Tristan und Isolde was placed – respecting the chronological order in which Wagner composed them - between the Berliners' Siegfried on Friday and Götterdammerung on Sunday.The performance which Bychkov coaxed from all sections of the BBCSO was a fabulous Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The transformative power of the Royal Albert Hall at Proms-time never ceases to amaze me. Here is Siegfried, the third in Wagner’s Ring cycle, sprawling in length, not over-strong in characters, yet in the Proms setting the rather over-extended character scenes cede to the extraordinary scene-painting, the noise of Mime’s metal-working, the inky mystery of Erda’s cavern, the bloody terrors of Fafner’s cave, the forest full of birdsong. Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin made sure last night that five and a half hours very nearly sped by, so sumptuous and yet delicate was their Read more ...
Roderic Dunnett
Garsington Opera, now based at John Paul Getty’s countrified home, the Wormsley Estate near Henley, has nipped a leaf out of Glyndebourne’s book and embarked on its first full-blooded Community Opera: a far cry from Vivaldi and Rossini, but not from Janáček (Garsington will stage The Cunning Little Vixen next season). Road Rage has a shiveringly well-turned, witty, singable text by Sir Richard Stilgoe, and a score by Orlando Gough, who was behind Glyndebourne’s big hit Imago.Featuring a "green" script that suggests Rome drove its famous viae stratae through helpless peasant smallholdings (cue Read more ...
David Nice
Things may be falling apart, a storm now rages but new broods of humans and demigoddesses have been fathered by chief god Wotan, who has undergone a Doctor Who like transformation from Iain Paterson into Bryn Terfel. Four new top singers appear on the scene after Monday night’s Rheingold superhumans, but Daniel Barenboim is still very much in control to colour and shape another deluxe semi-staged narrative in his Ring epic, this time about the steely warrior-maiden Valkyrie who came to know love.You’d expect Nina Stemme, many people’s favourite Wagnerian soprano, to dominate the picture Read more ...
David Nice
Swimming around in the Rhine is what most of us wanted to be doing on the hottest day of the year. A cooling, riverbed low E flat from Daniel Barenboim’s Berlin double basses, and then the staggered horn entries announced we were going to be in the finest sonic hands for two and a half hours – or nearly 15, if the colossal Proms Ring is to be accounted in its full, four-night glory. And glory it will be in the casting, too, if the flawlessly full, rich voices in the large Rheingold cast are anything to go by.Among the line-up were three singers in the leading men's roles I’d be happy to Read more ...