Opera
David Nice
Only a group of top musicians stood, or mostly sat, between a full but necessarily small house and Dr Malatesta’s Plastic Surgery Clinic in the bijou surroundings of Dun Laoghaire’s 324-seater Pavilion Theatre. The scaled-down wing of Irish National Opera’s season, touring between a highly-acclaimed production of Guillaume Tell and next March’s Der Rosenkavalier, worked so well because the same high values that have marked the other company offerings I’ve seen so far are very much in evidence.Donizetti’s stock farce of an old man duped into thinking he’s got himself a demure bride may not Read more ...
Sarah Connolly
The decision of Arts Council England to withdraw funding from the English National Opera and force it to move out of London is not only another hammer blow to the opera industry but it has huge ramifications for the extensive number of British freelance artists the company employs.ACE made this decision with no consultation with the ENO or the wider industry, and now huge numbers of freelancers are vulnerable and potentially without employment.We call on Sir Nicholas Serota and ACE to rethink this terrible decision, and to reflect on the choice they have made to target opera as an industry in Read more ...
David Nice
Looking for a sparkly operatic musical, well sung and played, slick and saturated in a range of mainstream styles that stop short in the year the movie masterpiece It’s a Wonderful Life was released, 1946? Then Jake Heggie’s 2016 confection may be for you. One thing’s for sure, though: it may be trying to do something different from the Capra classic, and it’s welcome to have the Bailey family as African Americans, but this isn't a patch on the rather more layered film.Endemic of the problem is that Capra’s crumpled, blue-eyed angel hoping to gain wings from helping a human in trouble has Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Paris, Vienna, Rome – all have their operatic homages. But London (and I mean real London, not the slightly-grey Italy of Donizetti’s Tudor Queens) only rarely makes it into the opera house. Curiously, on the rare occasions it does, it’s the seedy side of things that’s very much at the fore in The Beggar’s Opera and, of course, the Hogarth-inspired The Rake’s Progress.The city is the touchstone for any staging of the Stravinsky, telling the audience where on the dial between fairytale and morality play we’re going to fall. In Frederic Wake-Walker’s new production for the Royal Academy of Read more ...
Leo Hussain
I still remember vividly my first encounter with ENO. I was taken, as a nine-year-old boy, on a school trip to see a performance of Peter Grimes. And I was hooked. I pestered my parents to take me back several times to that same production. I can still hear the ringing of the "Storm" Interlude, and see the waves projected outside the door as the characters entered the pub (and I still remember sniggering with my classmates at the line "that’s a bitch of a gale out there").Over the following few years, many more school trips to ENO followed. Xerxes, Love for Three Oranges with its scratch Read more ...
David Nice
Handel’s audiences must have taken a very long time to settle – at least an act, to judge from the mostly inconsequential music of Alcina’s first hour. Lovely: we’re on an enchanted isle where puritanical people have been transformed into animal-headed courtiers, and a love-imbroglio merits only a “so what?” Richard Jones and his singers keep it lively and focused, but the bounce needed from Christian Curnyn and the Royal Opera House Orchestra doesn’t come.Eventually the charm of the personalities and the consistency of the staging win over, but it does show how much a conductor’s pacing Read more ...
David Nice
Sullivan’s Overture to The Yeomen of the Guard isn’t quite the equal of Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger – what is? – but its brass-rich brilliance and wholesome ceremonials wouldn’t have been possible without that great example. Cue the first of director Jo Davies’s missteps as a 1950s newsreel gives us the “backstory” of alleged spy Colonel Fairfax’s imprisonment: loud broadcast voice over Chris Hopkins’ already speedy account is a big mistake.Sometimes the fidgety routines for the chorus and three busbied tapdancers look like a halfhearted attempt to rival the more Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Ainadamar - meaning "fountain of tears" in Arabic – is the name given to a natural spring high in the hills above the Andalucian city of Granada, the site where the poet and playwright Federico Garica Lorca was executed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War. It’s also the name – and an apt one in many ways – of Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov’s extraordinary 2003 one act opera which tells the tale of Lorca’s life and death through a series of flashbacks.It is a ferocious mix of opera and flamenco in a production – a collaboration between Scottish Opera and Opera Read more ...
David Nice
In usual circumstances, a fully staged opera and every voice-and-piano song-cycle by a single genius in one weekend would be an embarrassment of riches. The only problem about Britten hitting the heights, above all in setting toweringly great poetry by Auden, Blake, Donne and Hölderlin, at the top of a long list, meant one sitting and squirming at most of Ronald Duncan’s wretched lines for an opera which even in its very subject is problematic, The Rape of Lucretia.Oliver Mears’ production (pictured below, both production images by Camilla Greenwell), originating here at Snape Maltings with Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
During the final act of Tamerlano, James Conway’s new production for English Touring Opera has the titular tyrant lead a captive king around the stage on a chain. Given the oppressive, deadlocked mood of Handel’s opera and this interpretation, you may recall Pozzo and Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: that frozen dialectic of master and slave in which power traps its holder as much as its victim. Conway’s farewell gift to ETO, after two decades of high achievement as artistic director, Tamerlano is sung with terrific verve and dramatic credibility by an impressive young cast. This Read more ...
Robert Beale
Though billed as a “concert performance”, this was really much more than that. With the resources of their own theatre, Opera North’s team present a staging that employs a big, built-up and raked floor, with a simple platform in the centre and a starry-night black back-cloth, and their principals and chorus move and act in simple but effective style.There are costumes, there is theatre lighting, and there are sound effects – thunder and rushing wind noises tell us we’re visiting the land of the dead and abode of the Furies (as well as Gluck’s music, of course). I’ve seen poorer production Read more ...
David Nice
Festival punters who eagerly return to this pleasant haven in south-east Ireland are happy to take a risk on the three rare operas served up each year. As a Wexford virgin, I knew I wanted to come here this autumn for Dvořák’s last opera Armida, revealed on recordings as a glorious score at every turn, even when the dramaturgy falters, and for Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, already a world-class Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin, as the eponymous lovelorn sorcerer.Ancipation was duly rewarded, even if the path to Dvořákian triumph proved arduous at times, at least in terms of getting out of the wreck Read more ...