Opera
David Nice
How does Mozart do it? His music can provoke deep emotions even in the unlikeliest operatic situations, if well done, and present circumstances stirred them up all the more on Sunday afternoon. Those flirtatious ladies flouncing around the prone prince in the first musical number of The Magic Flute – no overture here – only had to sing “although it breaks my heart in two/I have to bid farewell to you/until we meet again" for another tearful turn of the screw. There was more dramatically justified cause for the floodgates to open as heroine Pamina arrives to lead her Tamino through the Read more ...
David Nice
Throughout this most difficult of years, the Royal Opera has done the right thing for the singers on its Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. They were fortunate to finish the run of Handel’s Susanna before the Linbury Theatre closed down for over seven months (yesterday saw its reopening to a necessarily small audience). Stunning South African soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha amazed as the heroine, and went on to appear in both the third livestreaming from the main house and as the soloist of Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 in the brilliant 4/4 event. Two of the lunchtime singers, Read more ...
David Nice
Think you’ve seen enough of monologues and duets over the past few months? Watch this and reel. Four British directors, four conductors with close ties to the Royal Opera and five singers based here, from South African and Spanish-born sopranos on the house's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme and a baritone with youth also very much on his side to a top tenor and mezzo, between them serve up stagings of cantatas and song cycles which work brilliantly as a whole. The curator (three cheers!) is Director of Opera Oliver Mears, while the flawless and evocative designs common to four are by Read more ...
Nicky Spence
As patron for a community organisation, I see clearly how opera is the biggest collaboration going. Between stage, orchestra pit, school liaisons, chorus leaders, make-up bays and the magicians of the technical team, every cog is of equal importance. For the last 12 seasons, Blackheath Halls Community Opera has staged an opera each year, bringing together world class soloists and enthusiastic members of the local community who make up the orchestra and opera chorus. I really enjoy this further process of collaboration between professionals and members of the community.This takes an Read more ...
David Nice
It may be only six and a half months since many of us saw a production of Beethoven’s Fidelio in the opera house, but that was another world, and this post-lockdown admittance to Garsington Opera’s spacious, award-winning pavilion with its impressive acoustic was always going to be something extraordinary. It turned out to be all the more so given the revelations of what you can hear in Beethoven’s score as arranged by Francis Griffin for an ensemble of 13 Philharmonia players – as conductor Douglas Boyd pointed out, not better than the original, but startlingly different – and the Read more ...
David Nice
One source of advance information told us to expect a reduced version of Bartók’s one-act Bluebeard’s Castle, among the 20th century’s most original and profound operatic masterpieces. Joining 19 other lucky invitees and some of the LSO brass upstairs at St Luke’s, I realized immediately that the sea of comfortably distanced musicians covering the entire floor space, from violins at the east end in front of a conferring Simon Rattle, Karen Cargill and Gerald Finley, to percussion below us at the west, could only mean the real, full thing: the largest gathering of players I’d seen in London Read more ...
Christopher Lambton
Picture the scene. A vast steel gazebo covers a nondescript parking lot next to an industrial unit in Glasgow. With a clear plastic covering, it is the most rudimentary of shelters, sides open to admit the roar of the M8 and the wailing of sirens, carried on a keen autumnal breeze. About 100 people, all wearing masks, are seated at a random scattering of mismatched but carefully distanced chairs and tables, loosely grouped around a central stage. Around the perimeter, a scattering of tents, shipping containers, and flatbed lorry trailers, one of which is furnished to look like a dilapidated Read more ...
David Nice
What could be better than Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro to celebrate the Royal Opera’s next step on the path out of lockdown? Ideally, the rest of the opera, especially remembering Antonio Pappano’s lively interaction with his singers playing the continuo role. But the unavoidably touchy-feely action, even in a semi-staged performance, still can’t be realized, so what we got on Friday night was a starry(ish) gala instead – always a tricky act to sustain.First, the real cause for celebration: the full Royal Opera Orchestra filling the stalls area and the Chorus in the boxes and Read more ...
David Nice
In seach of Orpheus, and following a route from the Hades of (thankfully) masked beings on the underground to Archway, then up to a windy, grassy plateau just below Highgate village, this wandering critic encountered another myth about the power of life over death. Holst fashioned his Sāvitri, the only successful early (1907-8) fruit of the Sanskrit-translating composer’s quest to compose an Indian opera, as a short, bittersweet shoot from the riches of the epic Mahabhrata, remarkably concise (under half an hour) for its pre-war time. The composer thought it would be best performed in the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
As Dvořák’s "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka rose to its impassioned climax, Natalya Romaniw had to battle a helicopter thumping overhead. The helicopter lost (well, of course it did). As Nardus Williams and David Butt Phillip disappeared into the wings after a heart-rending "O soave fanciulla" from La Bohème, a squirrel scampered centre-stage to fill the dramatic vacuum. Anna Patalong and Ross Ramgobin’s wistful COVID-era take on "La ci darem la mano" from Mozart's Don Giovanni (pictured below) made sure that fingers never touched, but lent a previously unknown erotic frisson to a Read more ...
David Nice
Nostalgia of all kinds played a part in this summer evening’s divertissement. Some audience members were probably remembering when operetta held a greater sentimental sway than it does now; many would have been thinking of the full Opera Holland Park seasons – a proper theatre with raised seating, covered stagings, full orchestra and chorus – on what was now the bare terraced spot in front of the semi-derelict house. I was casting back in my mind to the blissful haven the park was in the spring, a necessary restorative on lockdown afternoon bike-rides and walks, and further to childhood Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Barrie Kosky’s production of Moses und Aron was staged at the Komische Oper Berlin in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Schoenberg’s opera is philosophical and open to a variety of interpretations. Kosky emphasises the story’s Jewish heritage, and the production is all about Jews and Judaism. That might seem a natural choice, given the occasion, but Kosky’s message is subtle, fully acknowledging the Holocaust, but presenting the Jewish people as complex and contradictory, and not just as victims.The production is dominated by the huge chorus, who are onstage Read more ...