fri 25/07/2025

Opera Reviews

Die Meistersinger at the Proms, BBC Four

David Nice

Two birthday parties kept me away from the Albert Hall yesterday (though I'll confess that in the end I treacherously skipped the second and stayed glued to the TV's delayed relay). That, and a slight fear that the concert performance of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg from the BBC Proms couldn't match up to the original Welsh National Opera production of the decade.

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The Duchess of Malfi, ENO, Punchdrunk

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

It's tough being a critic.

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La Traviata, Royal Opera

Ismene Brown

Of course she isn't now the watchful, learning 29-year-old who premiered Covent Garden’s opulent, sensually loaded production in 1995, but Gheorghiu’s varicoloured voice - a rainbow of tears, sobs, scoops, warbling runs and top notes that seem to rack her body with pain - has if anything added more colours since then (including a less fetching...

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I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw The Sky, Theatre Royal Stratford East

David Nice

John Adams thinks his and poet June Jordan's fantasia on love in a time of earthquake flopped at its 1995 Berkeley premiere for two main reasons.

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Salome, Royal Opera

David Nice

The first time I saw David McVicar's production of Strauss's hypersensuous shocker, I gaped in horrified wonder at the Pasolini Salò-style mise en scène but didn't find the action within it fully realised. When it came out on DVD, the close-ups won greater respect but there was still the problem of Nadja Michael's singing, hardly a note in true. Now it returns with Angela Denoke, an even more compelling actress with a far healthier soprano voice.

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Don Giovanni live from Aix, Ciné Lumière

David Nice

With several replicas of Mozart's libertine stalking the country this summer, there had to be a good reason for seeking him out in the cinema. I had two. One was a curiosity to see how the TV channel Arte and the French Institute in South Kensington would handle a medium so successfully exploited around the world by New York's Metropolitan Opera.

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Singing for Life, BBC Four/ Gazza's Tears, ITV1

Jasper Rees Township chorister goes it alone: Thami, 18, at an operatic audition

I once sat in a rehearsal room in a brick-box theatre on the outskirts of Cape Town. The cast was warming up for Carmen. First, the choreographer put 40 mostly black South African singers through a gruelling physical warm-up. Opera singers are rarely slender, and they were all in a muck sweat by the time the vocal coach stepped forward to lead them through a vocal warm-up. But when they opened their mouths it was as if someone has strapped you to a chair in a wind tunnel. The...

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Don Giovanni, Glyndebourne Festival Opera

Jonathan Wikeley

It seems somehow wrong to come away from a Don Giovanni feeling a bit noncommittal about the whole thing. It’s the sort of opera that should raise you from your seat – that should fire and inspire – but this performance, directed by Jonathan Kent, never truly got off the ground.

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Semele, Théâtre de Champs-Élysées

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

David McVicar's revival production of Handel's oratorio-cum-opera Semele isn't terribly clever or beautiful or impressive, or fecund with ideas or detail or emotion. But it does work. It does tell the story.

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Simon Boccanegra, Royal Opera House

David Nice

SIMON-2413_1448-DOMINGOFURLANETTO-CASHMOREI'll admit that many of us were spoiled by the last revival of...

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