Opera Reviews

Susanna, Iford Manor

stephen Walsh Sunday, 29 July 2012

Not all geese are swans, and not all Handel oratorios are like Messiah – storyless, spiritual, monumental sequences of reflective arias and choruses. By definition, though, they aren’t operas either, and it’s always a calculated risk to put them on the stage, as Iford Arts are doing with Susanna, a quasi-oratorio that Christopher Hogwood has described as “a pastoral opera verging on the comic”.

BBC Proms: Les Troyens, Royal Opera House Orchestra, Pappano

Charlotte Gardner Monday, 23 July 2012

Last night's concert performance of Berlioz's Les Troyens was not a Prom for the fainthearted. After all, if sitting through a five-hour opera had been a daunting undertaking for the Covent Garden audiences last month - who could also enjoy David McVicar's eye-catching staging - then it was inevitable that anyone seated in the Royal Albert Hall for the visually pared-down version was expecting to feel very culturally virtuous by the end of the night.

Comment

The Fairy Queen, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

alexandra Coghlan Saturday, 21 July 2012

Purcell certainly doesn’t make it easy for the champions of English opera. His beloved Dido and Aeneas is barely half an evening’s entertainment, so condensed is its tragedy, and the dense political satire of Dryden’s King Arthur text all but requires translation if it is to make sense to a contemporary audience.

Götterdämmerung, Longborough Festival

stephen Walsh Wednesday, 18 July 2012

Every production of Wagner’s Ring is a challenge. But to stage it in a smallish converted barn seating 500 with little or no stage machinery, which is what the Longborough Festival plans to do in a year’s time, might strike one as a particularly refined form of lunacy. The omens, nevertheless, could hardly be better.

The Turn of the Screw, Buxton Festival

philip Radcliffe Tuesday, 17 July 2012

Appearing at Buxton for the first time, Northern Ireland Opera are ahead of the game in marking next year’s Britten centenary by turning their attention to The Turn of the Screw. It is only their fifth production since the company was formed in 2010, so they are nothing if not adventurous. Being a chamber opera, the Screw suits their modest forces well, as it does the venue of Buxton Opera House.

BBC Proms: Pelléas et Mélisande, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, Gardiner

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Monday, 16 July 2012

How silly an armchair looks in the Royal Albert Hall - like a rubber duck floating in the Pacific. Yet how right it was for those behind this excellent semi- staged Proms performance of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande to try to recreate a bit of fin-de-siècle intimacy for this most intensely intimate of operas. And how appropriate also for there to be a couch on stage in a work that is, and has always been, a psychoanalyst's dream.

The Marriage of Figaro, Buxton Festival

philip Radcliffe Monday, 16 July 2012

Following the three home-grown opera productions, in come the visitors. And so we come to the “other” Figaro, the one by the 18^th-century Portuguese composer, Marcos Portugal. This being Buxton and the visiting company being Bampton Classical Opera, fellow-travellers in reviving neglected later 18^th-century works, Mozart would be just too, well, common. It’s not all that long ago that we had the “other” Barber of Seville, the Paisiello version here.

Eugene Onegin, Holland Park Opera

David Benedict Saturday, 14 July 2012

There are no two ways about this: Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece. The plotting is so thrillingly concise, the cunningly built-up musical passion so astonishingly detailed that there simply is no excuse for an underpowered or melodramatic production. But for the last 20 years, the Royal Opera and English National Opera have offered up one flawed – I’m being kind - production after another. Enter director Daniel Slater.

Comment

Otello, Royal Opera House

David Nice Friday, 13 July 2012

Pardon the anomaly of a lightly browned-up Latvian Moor married to a German-Greek beauty. This, after all, is not Shakespeare’s play but Verdi’s opera, for which all too few are born to sing heroic tenor Otello and lyric-dramatic soprano Desdemona.

The Maiden in the Tower & Kashchei the Immortal, Buxton Festival

philip Radcliffe Tuesday, 10 July 2012

Many years ago in Helsinki I met Sibelius’s daughter, Margareta, and her husband, the conductor Jussi Jalas. He used to come to Manchester to conduct the Halle. And it was he who rescued from obscurity his father-in-law’s only completed opera, The Maiden in the Tower, composed in 1896. This he did in 1981 on Finnish radio, not long before he died.