Opera
Jessica Duchen
Now for something completely different. The Excursions of Mr Brouček is Leos Janáček’s least typical opera and is rarely performed. Among his tragic tales such as Jenufa and Kat’a Kabanova, the charm of The Cunning Little Vixen and the strangely heart-twisting The Makropoulos Case, the Czech composer's biting satire – in which the time-travelling anti-hero is chiefly "blotto" – faces an uphill struggle for a look-in.Back in the English National Opera "powerhouse" days in the distant 1990s, the director David Pountney gave it a comparatively poetic staging, full of ballet and balloons (if I Read more ...
David Nice
"Elysian" is the best way to describe the dream gardens of Ireland's Lismore Castle in early June: lupins, alliums and peonies rampant in endless herbaceous borders, supernatural perspectives towards the main building on various levels. This year’s Blackwater Valley Opera Festival production of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, not so much: easily adjustable circumstances worked too often against talented performers in the converted stables space pressed into service once a year.Let’s start with the placement of the Irish Baroque Orchestra, so phenomenal under conductor Peter Whelan playing for the Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
The scene is Monte-Carlo, around the beginning of the last century: a carefully observed world of cloudless skies, glittering seas, high society and careless privilege shared with Death in Venice. John Cox’s staging works in cool harmony with the timeless, dangerous comedy of sexual politics devised by Mozart and da Ponte – and with the specifically English culture of country-house opera.The first night on Thursday was slow to ignite, a touch clunky in transition from casino table to hotel suite, conducted by Tobias Ringborg as if dotting every i in a recording studio. It snapped together Read more ...
Robert Beale
Wagner, in his medievalist, pan-European, 19th century way, wanted Parsifal to be a blend of abstract and religious experience for his audiences at Bayreuth, calling it a “festival play for a stage consecration”. Questions for those performing it today include how to do justice to its philosophical baggage as well as its marvellous music, and whether to introduce new elements in the visual staging that the composer never thought of.Directing Opera North’s first-ever performance of the work, Sam Brown’s approach has avoided getting it mired too deep in the philosophy and restricted Read more ...
stephen.walsh
With a lapse of three years between Das Rheingold and Siegfried, and with only a semi-staged Walküre in between, it’s been hard to stay tuned to Amy Lane’s Ring production at Longborough.Here, for instance, is Mime in his cave (rather well, if shabbily, furnished in Rhiannon Newman Brown’s bric-à-brac set), struggling to mend the sword which we haven’t seen broken, for the young Siegfried, of whose all-important parentage we as yet know nothing (Adrian Dwyer's Mime and Bradley Daley's Siegfried pictured below). Here, later, is Brünnhilde asleep on her mountain-top for reasons we haven’t Read more ...
Robert Beale
An opera in the Hallé concert series, conducted by Sir Mark Elder, is rather like a blend of a religious observance and a masterclass in orchestral playing and singing technique.The season finale at the Bridgewater Hall was Madama Butterfly, the first time in all his years in charge that Sir Mark has chosen Puccini for this treatment in the concert hall. He is a wizard at conveying this composer’s music, and, with a starry cast and a full symphony orchestra on the platform, the score came to life as probably never before for most of its hearers, even those who have experienced it in the Read more ...
Samson et Dalila, Royal Opera review - from austerity to excess, with visual rigour and aural beauty
David Nice
Words and situations are one-dimensional, but the music is chameleonic, if not profound, and crafted with a master’s hand. What to do about Saint-Saëns’s Biblical hokum? In Richard Jones’s new production, the end justifies the means, with persecuted Hebrews and mocking Philistines circling two essential star turns, and Antonio Pappano’s handling of a hard-to-pace score is vivid from opening keenings to final cataclysm.Let’s be clear: Saint-Saens started with the music of the second act, which is pure opera – an aria and two duets threaded by a brewing storm – while it’s Act One which starts Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
After two years of Covid-affected performances – even though there was a full season last year – Glyndebourne's annual festival is finally back in full glory. Following the big blaze of Saturday's The Wreckers, Sunday welcomed back Michael Grandage's durable production of a signature treasure, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.With a remarkable cast, phenomenal sounds from the pit and a sumptuous set, this was a very classy performance indeed. Set in 1960s Seville, the set – clearly inspired by the city’s Moorish architecture – was awash with muted colours and golden hues, and was a beautiful Read more ...
David Nice
Interesting for the history of music, but not for music? Passing acquaintance with Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, a grand opera by a woman at a time (the early 1900s) when circumstances made such a thing near-impossible, had suggested so. Then along come Glyndebourne’s music director, Robin Ticciati, and a team dedicated to two years’ research in putting the full original together, including an extra half-hour of music not heard before, and it turns out to be more than that.It's big-hearted, energetic and massively flawed. The libretto, by a one-time lover of the composer, Henry Brewster, an Read more ...
John Tomlinson
It has been a difficult couple of years for us in the world of opera, losing several of our most respected and admired colleagues who have inspired us over several decades. The names of Harry Kupfer, Graham Vick, Bernard Haitink come immediately to mind, and now must be added Harry Birtwistle to the list of losses which I have felt most personally in recent times.We were actually born in the same place, though twelve years apart; the same building in fact: the Rough Lea Nursing Home in Accrington, Lancashire. We were both brought up within a couple of miles of Accrington, he in Huncoat (fixed Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Thanks to the pandemic, the planned tidal surge of Fidelio productions never quite happened during Beethoven’s anniversary year of 2020. Instead, the birthday’s boy’s sole opera – beset by glitches and re-thinks ever since its creation – has rolled on intermittent waves into houses and halls around the world. Mounted by the Insula Orchestra with the accentus choir (based in the western Paris suburbs of the Hauts-de-Seine), the version conducted by Insula’s founder Laurence Equilbey arrived at the Barbican last night as something of a straggler.It had, all the same, much to offer and please Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it domestic farce and a fever-dream fantasy of a song-cycle: Stravinsky’s Mavra (1922) and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (1912) make for an unexpected double-bill. But, if the two stand slightly awkwardly next to one another, they are both facing in the same direction – each looking back into the musical past.Passacaglias and fugues, love-duets and ensembles, waltzes and folksongs: these are the fragments gathered up by two composers less interested in tearing down the musical establishment at the start of the 20th century than re-purposing it, twisting and skewing the Read more ...