Opera Reviews

La Fille Du Régiment, Royal Opera

Ismene Brown Monday, 17 May 2010

You can take the girl out of the barracks but you can’t take the barracks out of the girl would be one way to sum up Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment (Daughter of the Regiment), which I can’t conceive could have a more ribtickling production, more brilliantly sung, than the delight that opened last night at Covent Garden. Kill, as they say, to get a ticket. It has Natalie Dessay, Juan Diego Flórez, Ann Murray and Dawn French, and in a starring supporting role comes one of the...

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After Life, Barbican

alexandra Coghlan Sunday, 16 May 2010

"We need to inform you officially. Mr Walter, you died yesterday. I’m sorry for your loss." It comes as no great surprise to learn that Michel van der Aa’s opera After Life is based on a Japanese film. The Borgesian hyper-real scenario, the no-place location and meditative pacing all point, or rather - rejecting anything so crass - bow respectfully to their original source.

Juan Diego Florez, Barbican Hall

Edward Seckerson Saturday, 08 May 2010

Can we clear something up once and for all, please? Yet again this week an all too familiar headline caught my eye: “Is Juan Diego Florez the heir apparent to Pavarotti?” Or words to that effect. Why do these lazy (and/or ill-informed) editors and their headline writers keep asking the same rhetorical question? Surely they should know by now that the answer is a great big resounding “no”.

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Powder Her Face, RO, Linbury Studio Theatre

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Thursday, 29 April 2010

Sexy but not scandalous: the 'vocally terrific' Joan Rodgers as the Duchess

Let's get straight to the fellatio, shall we. The blow job - and its Polaroid rendition - that led to the 1960s divorce trial of the dissolute Duchess of Argyll forms the centrepiece aria (an aria that "begins with words and ends with humming") in Thomas Adès's opera Powder Her Face. And how good we were: as silent as a row of...

Aida, Royal Opera House

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Tuesday, 27 April 2010

David McVicar's new Aida production had an opening mise en scène of such unashamed ugliness, a revolving main feature (a wall of scaffolding) of such audacious featurelessness, a wardrobe of such brazen tastelessness (think Dungeons and Dragons), that my critical faculties sort of went into a coma.

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Elegy for Young Lovers, ENO, Young Vic

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Sunday, 25 April 2010

We all know what you get when you find yourself snowed in with your family up a mountain: thunderous carpets, corridors of blood, redrum and a head in the snow.

Prima Donna, Sadler's Wells

David Nice Monday, 12 April 2010

Why write gluey pastiche Massenet and Puccini when you could compose as your flamboyant self? Why collaborate on a cliché-ridden French text when your song lyrics declare themselves so piquantly in English? Rufus Wainwright must have his own reasons for concocting a fantasy of what opera might, or used to, be.

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Platée, Opera du Rhin

Ismene Brown Friday, 26 March 2010

French geography has a significant hand in the small but exuberantly formed opera and dance that comes out of that civilised country - scaled for the important theatres that lie far beyond Paris and which have a great deal to teach Britain about creating a vivid national landscape.

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The Cunning Little Vixen, Royal Opera

Igor Toronyi-Lalic Saturday, 20 March 2010

The Vixen and the lard-arse Hens: 'love and loss and the joys of being alive'

I have no compunction laying into vastly overrated composers, crazily overpaid conductors or ...

Katya Kabanova, English National Opera

David Nice Monday, 15 March 2010

It's amazing how much you can tell of what lies ahead from the way a conductor handles a master composer's first chord. Katya Kabanova's opening sigh of muted violas and cellos underpinned by double basses should tell us that the Volga into which the self-persecuted heroine will eventually throw herself is a river, real or metaphorical, of infinite breadth and depth.