Opera
Robert Beale
Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical music.That’s a big ambition, as the two might seem to have little in common. But Anna Himali Howard’s simple production concept of a marriage celebration, where Orpheus is a white British guy and Eurydice an Asian girl, set in the back garden of a semi-detached house – probably in Leeds – is a symbol of the whole enterprise.The design (Leslie Travers Read more ...
Jasdeep Singh Degun and Laurence Cummings
We believe that with Orpheus, we are creating something which will invite audiences to rethink what opera can and should be. Inspired by Monteverdi’s 1607 work L’Orfeo, it grew out of Opera North’s long-standing relationship with South Asian Arts-uk, a Leeds-based centre of excellence for South Asian music and dance.Sung in Italian and Urdu with excerpts in Malayalam, Bengali, Panjabi, Hindi and Tamil, it brings together European baroque and Indian classical music in a way which has never been heard before.We are only too aware that we are working with two massive musical traditions, but the Read more ...
David Nice
The sopranos are Ethiopian-Italian and Hispanic-American, the tenor Uzbek, the baritones South African (no EU principals, but it seems you can't have everything). This is opera at its best: the cream of international singers coming together to make a unified work of art under a director with a vision and a conductor who gives it all total security as well as freedom. It may be the tour, but it’s vintage Glyndebourne.Floris Visser’s concentrated take on Puccini’s note-perfect La bohème, revived here by Simon Iorio, premiered in the main festival earlier this year; Miranda Heggie Read more ...
Kevin Sullivan
The Khanenko Museum stands opposite the Taras Shevchenko Park in central Kyiv, a popular green oasis next to the University. One of the 83 Russian missiles fired into Ukrainian cities on Monday this week landed at an intersection on the edge of the park, killing several commuters. Just a few days earlier, on 1 and 2 October, the Khanenko was the venue for a remarkable new opera by the Ukrainian composers Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko – a work of art that eloquently testifies to the value of human experience and will continue to do so long after the present assault on Ukraine’s civilian Read more ...
David Nice
You know you’re in good company the minute these two appear on stage: they are so splendidly what they are, comfortable in their own skins and perfect in role-play. Justin Vivian Bond, consummate trans cabaret artist, meets Anthony Roth Constanzo, one of the world’s top countertenors, and nothing is out of bounds.Hot from Brooklyn, the partnership seems both unlikely and utterly natural, subversive from the start. The glamorous, sassy Bond can hit the bass register if necessary; Costanzo adapts what, at least with miking, sounds like the most powerful of falsettos to torchsongs and disco as Read more ...
David Nice
Rome, 14/15 June 1800: the specifics of the original Sardou melodrama are preserved in Puccini’s thriller mixing love, lust, religion and tyranny. Many productions move forward in time, and sometimes change the place, with ease: after all, feudalist power-abusers remain with us. Director Christof Loy decides that police chief Scarpia and his allies should be of the era following the French revolution, while artist Cavaradossi is a “timeless” freedom fighter.The results, first seen at Finnish National Opera, weaken the immediacy of this brilliant music-drama, while keeping much of the action Read more ...
David Nice
No gods, ancient Egyptian or otherwise; no sinister priest along the lines of Russia’s antichrist Patriarch Kiriil, sending soldiers to their deaths with the promise of heaven. Military ritual under what looks like a Russian/Chinese flag prevails in Robert Carsen’s severe take on Aida, more rigid than Verdi’s surprisingly unified late score - a musical masterpiece if not a dramatic one.With no Schiller or Shakespeare as base, only the Egyptians and international dignitaries to please for the opening of the Cairo Opera House, Verdi’s librettist Ghislanzoni and scenario deviser Auguste Mariette Read more ...
stephen.walsh
What, anyway, is The Makropulos Case all about? Is it simply about the horrors of unnatural longevity; or does it expose the limitations of the rational mind confronted by the irrational; is it about love of a distorted ideal, like some updated Hoffmann tale? Or is it simply a well-made play disrupted by theatre of the absurd and turned for good measure into a tragic music drama?The truth is that it’s all these things and more, a work of stunning complexity both dramatically and, especially, musically. And the best thing I can say about Olivia Fuchs’s new production is that it takes account Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Covid has been devastating for all the arts, but especially opera – the riskiest and most expensive gamble of the lot. And it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near done yet. On one memorable night this summer the number of covers stepping into principal roles across the various country-house opera companies hit double figures. And not small ones. So what do we do? Crash on as before and hope for the best? Scale back and build in safeguards, both human and financial? Or throw out the whole setup and start afresh?It's the latter that we’re currently seeing in action at If Opera, whose first real Read more ...
Simon Thompson
It’s not an opera, of course, but of all Handel’s oratorios, Saul is probably the one that is best suited to being presented as an actual drama. Several productions, most notably Barrie Kosky's at Glyndebourne, have shown how it can work on stage, but this performance at the Edinburgh International Festival proved that you can have a great evening’s drama with nary a prop or costume in sight.The key to Saul’s dramatic success is partly the condensed nature of its story but, more importantly, the vast range of music colours that Handel draws upon. It’s the most diverse orchestra he used in any Read more ...
David Nice
“Twenty lovesick maidens we,” pining in stained-glass attitudes for florid poet Reginald Bunthorne, usually kick off Gilbert and Sullivan’s delicious mockery of the high (or cod) aesthetical. That might have been a problem for Charles Court Opera’s total cast of nine. Not so: the lights go up on three “melancholy”, Goth-sh maybe not-quite-“maidens", knocking it back at the bar of the Castle Inn, and we know we’re in the best of hands. The delight is unmodified over the next two hours.That includes the late replacement for the lead sham-aesthete; Matthew Kellett was ill, and while we wish him Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
You’d be forgiven for forgetting that 2022 marks a rather significant classical milestone. Vaughan Williams’ 150th anniversary has scarcely troubled the Proms season beyond the odd symphony, and while most orchestras are doing their bit in the autumn, it takes predictable form. Larks will ascend, Thomas Tallis will be hymned, and Scott will make his doomed journey to the Antarctic to live symphonic accompaniment up and down the country. But not at British Youth Opera.The reasons to celebrate a company that’s been the finishing school for most British operatic talent (on-stage and off) for 35 Read more ...