Opera
David Nice
You know great singing when you hear it. In Handel, for me, that was when Lucy Crowe took over a Göttingen gala back in 2013; in Mozart, most recently, it came from Emily D’Angelo making her Royal Opera debut in La clemenza di Tito. Last night, in an opera of genius from first note to last, both shone, but neither eclipsed other performances or took the spotlight from the ravishingly beautiful playing of Harry Bicket’s English Concert.Handel's main roles were divided between five women’s voices of outstanding quality, delivering the sort of performances where singing seems as natural as Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
David Alden’s Lohengrin is back at Covent Garden for a first revival. The defining image the first time round, in 2018, was of the ending, a political rally for King Henry’s regime, with Lohengrin and the swan as its icons. That felt crude – a two-dimensional morality, and tangential to the story.That still smarts, but Alden’s ideas (revived without noticeable changes by Peter Relton) are more diverse than they first seemed and repay a second viewing. Musically, the revival is quite strong, with impressive leads but a weaker supporting cast; a fitful ensemble effort where the first run was Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
However familiar you are with The Handmaid’s Tale in Margaret Atwood’s novel or its TV adaptation, you might still be knocked sideways by the impact it makes as an opera. Poul Ruders’s music plunges us viscerally into its emotional world, where his ambitious adaptation, premiered in 2000 and first heard in the UK three years later, packs one hell of a punch, its intensity terrifying and relentless. It was not an unqualified success back then, but times have changed, its chilling resonances in a world of Trump and the Taliban are only too clear and the TV series has given the story a Read more ...
David Nice
There are quite a few dull patches in the early Verdi operas that aren’t Nabucco, Ernani or Macbeth, so I wasn’t expecting so very much from the 26-year-old composer’s first shot. That was without taking into account how spiritedly the ad hoc Chelsea Opera Group Orchestra would play for conductor Matthew Scott Rogers, whizzing this shortish opera along but never breathlessly, and how well the main roles would be taken.Rogers's skill in getting his orchestra to phrase and breathe was apparent right at the start in a string arrangement of Myroslav Skoryk's bittersweet Melody, originally for Read more ...
David Nice
Having sung the Gondoliers’ Duet with an Iranian tenor who’d been a big pop star in his native land, I know that internationalism hit performances of the Savoy operas some time ago (this superb but all-white ensemble admittedly doesn't follow the general phenomenon). The master composer and the verbal wit may not have travelled the world musically speaking, apart from a famous little excursion into Japonisme, but we can safely acclaim them as lifelong Europeans.In the earlier gems of his partnership with Gilbert, Sullivan gives us loving, memorable spoofs of Italian and German opera from Read more ...
David Nice
Beware of joining the Duke of Mantua’s sleazy feast in time of Covid too late, as I did on Opera North’s Newcastle leg of its Verdi journey. You may find more than a couple of the distinguished guests on stage have fallen sick – three, no less, on Wednesday night, including the Rigoletto and the Gilda, as well as the main conductor. But if you’re lucky, as I also was, you may discover unanticipated compensations.A personal explanation may be necessary here; baritone Eric Greene came to my third Opera in Depth Zoom session, and gave us a two-hour masterclass on Verdi’s music for his Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
When we first meet Sarah, the teenage heroine of Freya Waley-Cohen’s WITCH, she’s alone in her bedroom Googling “How to stop feeling shitty?”. She’s being bullied and sexualised by boys at school, but she could just as easily be asking on behalf of any one of her operatic forebears: Manon; Carmen; Armida; Alcina; Butterfly; Elvira.This triple bill, which frames Waley-Cohen’s new work with Monteverdi and Strauss’s takes on the abandoned and betrayed Ariadne/Arianna, offers a statement about the female experience – AKA operatic variations on feeling shitty.Too often lectures when it should live Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
To stage a double bill of unusual 20th century Russian operas would be brave at the best of times. To do so in the Fair City of Perth amply demonstrates Scottish Opera’s laudable commitment to extend its influence beyond the Edinburgh-Glasgow cultural axis. Perth is blessed with a fine old theatre and a superb modern wood-panelled concert hall, but it’s a good 90 minutes from Scottish Opera’s base in Glasgow and more often than not simply bypassed by holidaymakers heading for the heather and snowclad peaks of the Highlands.Rachmaninov’s The Miserly Knight and Stravinsky’s Mavra are an Read more ...
Richard Bratby
JS Bach’s Passions as music theatre? Well, why not? Whatever the aura of untouchability around these works, they were always conceived as part of a bigger picture: a communal sacred ritual in which the divide between performer and audience wasn’t so much blurred as nonexistent.Anything that gets us closer to that experience surely serves Bach’s ends; at any rate, something needs to be done to break these works out of the curious sterility of so many modern concert performances or the frosty purity of the recording studio. In that light, English Touring Opera’s decision to tour the St John Read more ...
David Nice
"Why does he have to sentimentalise this piece?", Britten is reported by former Royal Opera director John Tooley to have said of Jon Vickers as Peter Grimes the tormented fisherman, so very different from the composer's life partner and creator of the role Peter Pears. Britten didn't qualify his disappointment by stating what for most of us is obvious: Vickers was one of the great tenor voices, and his latest successor in the role, Allan Clayton, is heading for that kind of status too.Handsome indeed, as is this production and so much about it; but in both Vickers’ case and this, lacking some Read more ...
stephen.walsh
If like me you regard the ending of Janáček’s Jenůfa as one of the most moving scenes in all opera, you might care to consider how it would be possible to deflate it in spite of the best singing imaginable. You might, for instance, bring up a back curtain revealing a beautiful garden three or four years on with a sweet little boy gambolling through it, the future product, presumably, of Laca and Jenůfa’s love as opposed to the frozen product of hers and Laca’s half brother Števa’s, recently discovered under the river ice.No surely: too kitsch by half! But that is precisely what happens in the Read more ...
David Nice
Serendipity, rather than the fate which clings to the protagonist of Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, led me to catch the last night of a double-cast spectacular at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. What a tonic to find a top-notch young cast and orchestra working their disciplined socks off for conductor Dominic Wheeler and director Martin Lloyd-Evans after the dog’s dinner of English Touring Opera’s Rimsky-Korsakov on Saturday.Menotti’s 1946 bagatelle about a girl who’d rather be on the telephone than communicating with her matrimony-minded boyfriend is the light to the mostly dark of Read more ...