fri 29/03/2024

Opera Reviews

The Makropulos Affair, Welsh National Opera review - complexity realised brilliantly on the stage

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?

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La rondine, If Opera review - a bold opening gambit from a company changing the business of opera

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?

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Saul, The English Concert, Butt, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - properly exciting music drama

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.

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Patience, Charles Court Opera, Wilton's Music Hall review - bar room bliss

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.

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Sir John in Love, British Youth Opera review - a delicious end-of-summer treat

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.

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Salome, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Gardner, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - orchestral majesty triumphs

Christopher Lambton

It is quite some years, if not decades, since the Edinburgh International Festival had any claim to be a festival of staged opera. This year we have had just one – Garsington Opera’s bewitching Rusalka – surrounded by a handful of concert performances: Beethoven’s Fidelio with the Philharmonia under Donald Runnicles, Handel’s Saul (yet to come), and Sunday evening’s Salome.

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La Voix humaine/Les Mamelles de Tirésias, Glyndebourne review - phantasmagorical wonders

David Nice

“Variety is the spice of life! Vive la difference!,” chirrups the ensemble at the end of this giddying double bill. And there could hardly be more singular variety acts than a potential suicide at the end of a phone line, a woman who lets her breasts fly away and grows a beard, and a husband who breeds 40,049 children on his own.

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Rusalka, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - sumptuous rendition of a watery fable

Christopher Lambton

The last-minute indisposition of your leading lady is enough to give festival directors palpitations, let alone their audiences, now forewarned by the dreaded email thudding into inboxes.

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theartsdesk at the Bayreuth Festival Ring 2022 - a jumbled mess of ideas, some of them compelling

Gavin Dixon

It is mid-way through the new Ring cycle, and we are taking lunch outside the old town hall on the high street in Bayreuth. Discussion at neighbouring tables is intense: “The Ring is a child!”, “Why does Wotan have no spear?”, “The pyramid in the box – what is that all about?”

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Utopia, Limited, National Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company review - bounded rapture

Richard Bratby

Joseph Heller grew tired of being told that he’d never written anything as good as Catch 22. ‘Who has?’, he'd retort. In the same spirit, it’s futile to compare Gilbert and Sullivan’s late flop Utopia, Limited to The Mikado, The Gondoliers, Iolanthe or The Pirates of Penzance.

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