Opera Reviews
The Elixir of Love, English National OperaThursday, 15 September 2011
“An elixir with a kick, sir, one that really packs a punch”, sings Adina in Jonathan Miller’s Midwestern The Elixir of Love, and she couldn’t be more right. A night spent among the floral prints, perky ponytails and pastel wipe-down surfaces of this production is like being battered around the head with a bouquet of roses wielded by Doris Day. Read more... |
Il Trittico, Royal Opera HouseTuesday, 13 September 2011
You don't need to buy into the loose hell-purgatory-paradise trajectory of Puccini's one-act operas to greet the triptych as his comprehensive masterpiece, full of wry interconnections, orchestral wizardry and grateful if tough vocal writing. Read more... |
BBC Proms: Der Freischütz, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, GardinerSaturday, 10 September 2011
What kind of work could possibly elbow aside the time-honoured ritual of performing Beethoven's Ninth on the penultimate (ie, the last serious) night of the Proms? The kind that even Beethoven was gobsmacked by. Read more... |
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Mariinsky Opera, Gergiev, Edinburgh Festival TheatreFriday, 02 September 2011
Under Western eyes, Gergiev’s Mariinsky forces had been turning to stone – like the titular shadowless woman's solipsistic husband in Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s polyphonic fairy tale – each time they stepped outside the Russian repertoire. There was the calamitous Verdi season at Covent Garden, and the ungainly Wagner Ring cycle which saw the opera company’s temporary twilight in London. In densest Strauss, the German word and the vital sense of movement arrived... Read more... |
Don Giovanni, Opera Up Close, Soho TheatreFriday, 26 August 2011
When you go to a trendy London performance "space" to watch an opera about rape and murder you should probably expect a few shocks. Or, if this ain’t your first Don Giovanni, you should expect not to be surprised by whatever provocations the director may have in store – which is much the same. What you probably don’t expect is for the overture to be played electronically and/or sound like it’s been remixed by Thom Yorke. But in Robin Norton-Hale’s "new ... Read more... |
BBC Proms: Rinaldo, Glyndebourne Festival OperaFriday, 26 August 2011
What was the audience on? They tittered when the bicycles came on, nearly cried when the whip was unleashed and virtually pissed themselves when the warring sides in Handel's crusader fantasy Rinaldo started fighting it out with hockey and lacrosse sticks (I know! Too-oo funny!). After last year's randy bunnies, Glyndebourne's Prom visits are fast becoming... Read more... |
The Emperor of Atlantis, Arcola TheatreWednesday, 17 August 2011
We critics often find ourselves "embarrassed by historical facts", as Craig Raine once put it. Raine was trying to explain why so many people still value Wilfred Owen's poetry - to him, the most overrated corpus of the 20th century. "[Owen's] life and death as a soldier make literary criticism seem invalid and pedantic," he argued, before proceeding to a very validly pedantic demolition job. Music has its own Wilfred Owens. Viktor Ullmann is one. His reputation (which was showcased last... Read more... |
The Turn of the Screw, Glyndebourne Festival OperaFriday, 12 August 2011
Glyndebourne’s production of Benjamin Britten’s terrifying The Turn of the Screw is one that really does turn the screw tightly in the mind. It pierces time with its updating from its original Victorian setting to a bleak Fifties Britain, it tightens the tension with its wintry, claustrophic setting, and it delivers its questions into our suspicious, information-saturated modern heads with added twists. Given a magnificent musical and dramatic ensemble to interpret it in this... Read more... |
Tannhäuser, Bayreuth FestivalTuesday, 02 August 2011
In 1981, when I last came to Bayreuth, the festival still seemed to be a battleground between the German Left and Right, between the blame faction and the guilt faction, between the commie East and the fat-cat West. Plus ça change. Without quite openly taking sides, Sebastian Baumgarten’s new staging of Tannhäuser rings some cracked old political bells while, apparently with Bayreuth’s connivance, candidly parodying most of the thinking that underpins this admittedly... Read more... |
La Bohème, The Village UndergroundThursday, 28 July 2011
Vignette Productions is a bit of a one-off in the operatic world. It was established three years ago by the rising young British tenor Andrew Staples, his mission to create operas that were more exciting and told better stories than those generally on offer. Staples directs rather than sings; his casts are made up of young unknown singers, and the productions to date certainly fulfil the original aim. Last year, their summer production of Cosi fan tutte had the audience sitting in... Read more... |
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