Opera
edward.seckerson
The apartment is shared with a Burmese cat named Hermione and two no less exquisite and venerable harpsichords. In the "library", lavishly bound scores attest to Rousset's archival spirit with his latest pride and joy laid out on the table - the original full score and continuo parts for Louis XIV's favourite opera: Lully's Bellérophon which Rousset and his group will present in the first performances in modern times later this year - including one in the newly restored L'Opéra Royal at Versailles. Rousset's latest CD release is of rarely heard harpsichord suites by Louis Couperin, uncle of Read more ...
Jasper Rees
I once sat in a rehearsal room in a brick-box theatre on the outskirts of Cape Town. The cast was warming up for Carmen. First, the choreographer put 40 mostly black South African singers through a gruelling physical warm-up. Opera singers are rarely slender, and they were all in a muck sweat by the time the vocal coach stepped forward to lead them through a vocal warm-up. But when they opened their mouths it was as if someone has strapped you to a chair in a wind tunnel. The noise was transforming, majestic, all-powerful. So I knew roughly what sound to expect in Singing for Life, a Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
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. But without the intensity and the drama from these Read more ...
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.Appropriately for a production as deliberately confused in concept as this one - where the characters Read more ...
David Nice
I'll admit that many of us were spoiled by the last revival of Boccanegra at Covent Garden - also of Verdi's most often heard and masterly revision, like the current staging, but using Ian Judge's production of the original version - boasting a near-perfect quartet of principals who all meshed with each other. The only survivor from that team to be seen in the latest showing is Ferrucio Furlanetto (pictured with Domingo above), whose Prologue aria as the vengeful father of Boccanegra's ill-fated love was cheered to the rafters then but barely made an impact this time, oddly over-acted and Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
The story starts promisingly with a love story between a prisoner Gomatz and Zaide, the favourite concubine of the tyrant Soliman. The two lovers escape with the help of Allazim. They are re-captured. Then Mozart gave up. His sources for the story, by Sebastiani and Voltaire’s Zaïre, ended it by the dubious plot twist that Zaide and Gomatz are actually brother and sister and that Allazim saved Soliman’s life some years earlier and he lets them all free. The strongest bits of the unfinished opera are a few arias, notably “Ruhe sanft” – which has become a concert staple. Perhaps Mozart Read more ...
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. In a sense it’s music drama at its purest: the plot is an appendage to the music, what Wagner later called “deeds of Read more ...
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. Add director Laurent Pelly (of La Fille du régiment fame), Anna Netrebko and young Read more ...
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.Bed admittedly is iconic in the Dream, a work in which half the Read more ...
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.It launches with a masterstroke: a dropcloth collage portraying German-speaking genius from Bach and Mozart to Pina Bausch and Michael Haneke, embracing all creeds and persuasions Read more ...
edward.seckerson
Edward Gardner is no longer English National Opera's best kept secret. The former choral scholar and repetiteur goes from strength to strength helming ENO through productive and interesting times. The world's stages are now beckoning. During a break in final rehearsals for Mozart's great opera seria Idomeneo in a new production from multi-media queen Katie Mitchell he talks informally about what being music director of a company like this entails.The long conversations with directors (what kind of things is Terry Gilliam asking him ahead of his operatic debut next season?), the relationship Read more ...
rebecca.ritzel
To get a feel for whether an arts festival has truly penetrated a city’s psyche, it helps to strike up a conversation with local Starbucks baristas. That’s why I was grateful to be asked one recent evening in Toronto, “So what exactly is Luminato?”As the green-aproned server handed me a post-show cup of tea, I thought, good question: what is Luminato? Four years after the festival’s founding, it seems many Toronto residents remain unsure. I explained that it’s an arts festival with many different events, including performances at nearby theatres. As it happens, I had just come from a Read more ...