Opera Reviews
Le nozze di Figaro, Glyndebourne Festival OperaSunday, 09 June 2013
The Marriage of Figaro is so much a part of Glyndebourne’s history that it’s sometimes hard to recall the details of this or that production. Read more...
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Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Garsington OperaSaturday, 08 June 2013
In sunshineand bright blue skies there can be few places more green and pleasant than Wormsley Park. Garsington Opera has found a happy home there, with this being its third season in its sleekly rectilinear big top at the Getty family’s Buckinghamshire estate. Read more... |
Wagner Dream, Welsh National OperaFriday, 07 June 2013
Those who knew the composer Jonathan Harvey, who died of motor neurone disease last December, will remember him as the least demonstrative, least theatrical of men. His presence was gentle, soft-spoken, essentially inward – the physical image of the Buddhism that came to dominate his spiritual consciousness in the latter half of his life. Read more... |
Owen Wingrave, Guildhall School of MusicThursday, 06 June 2013
Although originally commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Benjamin Britten’s opera Owen Wingrave was always intended to be an opera-for-television. Perhaps it’s this unusual pedigree that has scared off potential performances of this little-seen work, perhaps it’s the piece’s awkward drama and barely digested polemic. Either way it’s a shame. Read more... |
The Perfect American, English National OperaSunday, 02 June 2013
There were a small but substantial number of children dotted around the auditorium at the opening night of The Perfect American, and one hopes they hadn’t been led to expect singalong-a-Disney, all bright colours and catchy tunes. Read more... |
I Puritani, Grange Park OperaSaturday, 01 June 2013
Apparently Bellini’s I Puritani was Queen Victoria’s favourite opera. That wasn’t quite reason enough for director Stephen Langridge to condemn the cast of his new Grange Park production to this extraordinarily ugly sartorial era, but unfortunately he found his justification nonetheless – looking across the Channel to the scientific explorations and experiments of Paris’s notorious hospital la Salpêtrière. Read more... |
Imeneo, Academy of Ancient Music, Hogwood, Barbican HallThursday, 30 May 2013
There are Handel operas where you wait impatiently for the handful of truly original set-pieces to light up the action, hoping the singers are equal to their challenges. One such is surely Siroe, Re di Persia, bravely staged at the Göttingen Handel Festival the other week. Others like Imeneo sparkle with genius and personality in virtually every number, musically if not dramatically the equal of a Shakespeare late romance. Read more... |
London Contemporary Orchestra, Hugh Brunt, Aldwych StationTuesday, 28 May 2013
Three hundred years ago we danced and ate to art music. Before that we worshipped to it. In the 19th century we began to sit and stare at it. The immersive music movement of the past decade has moved things along again. Today we are encouraged to swim through performances, sniffing the music out, hunting it down. The latest ensemble to free themselves from the sit-and-stare model are the enterprising outfit, the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO). Read more... |
Lohengrin, Welsh National OperaFriday, 24 May 2013
What is one to make of Lohengrin, Wagner’s last “opera” (as opposed to music drama), in this day and age? Is it a medieval romance, like Weber’s Freischütz but with a deus ex machina at the beginning rather than the end; or is it a nineteenth-century domestic melodrama in disguise, with the hero revealed in the bedroom scene as a Papal Nuncio travelling incognito. Why mustn’t Elsa ask his name? Read more... |
Falstaff, Glyndebourne Festival OperaMonday, 20 May 2013
In this revival of Richard Jones's 2009 production, the action has been very effectively shifted to post-war Windsor with Sir John Falstaff (Laurent Naouri) as down-at-heel gentry maintaining delusions of superiority, rubbing up against an ascendant middle class. Nannetta and Fenton are presumably about to play their part in the baby boom. Period features abound, from chintz and mock Tudor to soda siphons, troupes of Brownies and a Victrola cabinet. Read more... |
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