Opera Reviews
theartsdesk at Wexford Festival Opera - the bad, the good and the gloriousWednesday, 26 October 2022
Festival punters who eagerly return to this pleasant haven in south-east Ireland are happy to take a risk on the three rare operas served up each year. As a Wexford virgin, I knew I wanted to come here this autumn for Dvořák’s last opera Armida, revealed on recordings as a glorious score at every turn, even when the dramaturgy falters, and for Irish soprano Jennifer Davis, already a world-class Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin, as the eponymous lovelorn sorcerer. Read more... |
Orpheus, Opera North review - cross-cultural opera in actionSaturday, 15 October 2022
Within its own aspirations, Orpheus is a complete triumph. “Monteverdi reimagined”, as Opera North subtitled it from the start, is an attempt to unite (and contrast, and compare, and cross-fertilise) early baroque opera with South Asian classical music. Read more... |
La bohème, Glyndebourne Tour review - Death and the Parisienne doing the roundsFriday, 14 October 2022
The sopranos are Ethiopian-Italian and Hispanic-American, the tenor Uzbek, the baritones South African (no EU principals, but it seems you can't have everything). This is opera at its best: the cream of international singers coming together to make a unified work of art under a director with a vision and a conductor who gives it all total security as well as freedom. It may be the tour, but it’s vintage Glyndebourne. Read more... |
Tosca, English National Opera review - a tale of two erasSaturday, 01 October 2022
Rome, 14/15 June 1800: the specifics of the original Sardou melodrama are preserved in Puccini’s thriller mixing love, lust, religion and tyranny. Many productions move forward in time, and sometimes change the place, with ease: after all, feudalist power-abusers remain with us. Director Christof Loy decides that police chief Scarpia and his allies should be of the era following the French revolution, while artist Cavaradossi is a “timeless” freedom fighter. Read more... |
Aida, Royal Opera review - dour but disciplinedMonday, 26 September 2022
No gods, ancient Egyptian or otherwise; no sinister priest along the lines of Russia’s antichrist Patriarch Kiriil, sending soldiers to their deaths with the promise of heaven. Military ritual under what looks like a Russian/Chinese flag prevails in Robert Carsen’s severe take on Aida, more rigid than Verdi’s surprisingly unified late score - a musical masterpiece if not a dramatic one. Read more... |
The Makropulos Affair, Welsh National Opera review - complexity realised brilliantly on the stageSaturday, 17 September 2022
What, anyway, is The Makropulos Case all about? Is it simply about the horrors of unnatural longevity; or does it expose the limitations of the rational mind confronted by the irrational; is it about love of a distorted ideal, like some updated Hoffmann tale? Read more... |
La rondine, If Opera review - a bold opening gambit from a company changing the business of operaSaturday, 27 August 2022
Covid has been devastating for all the arts, but especially opera – the riskiest and most expensive gamble of the lot. And it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near done yet. On one memorable night this summer the number of covers stepping into principal roles across the various country-house opera companies hit double figures. And not small ones. So what do we do? Crash on as before and hope for the best? Scale back and build in safeguards, both human and financial? Read more... |
Saul, The English Concert, Butt, Edinburgh International Festival 2022 review - properly exciting music dramaFriday, 26 August 2022
It’s not an opera, of course, but of all Handel’s oratorios, Saul is probably the one that is best suited to being presented as an actual drama. Read more... |
Patience, Charles Court Opera, Wilton's Music Hall review - bar room blissThursday, 25 August 2022
“Twenty lovesick maidens we,” pining in stained-glass attitudes for florid poet Reginald Bunthorne, usually kick off Gilbert and Sullivan’s delicious mockery of the high (or cod) aesthetical. That might have been a problem for Charles Court Opera’s total cast of nine. Not so: the lights go up on three “melancholy”, Goth-sh maybe not-quite-“maidens", knocking it back at the bar of the Castle Inn, and we know we’re in the best of hands. The delight is unmodified over the next two hours. Read more... |
Sir John in Love, British Youth Opera review - a delicious end-of-summer treatThursday, 25 August 2022
You’d be forgiven for forgetting that 2022 marks a rather significant classical milestone. Vaughan Williams’ 150th anniversary has scarcely troubled the Proms season beyond the odd symphony, and while most orchestras are doing their bit in the autumn, it takes predictable form. Larks will ascend, Thomas Tallis will be hymned, and Scott will make his doomed journey to the Antarctic to live symphonic accompaniment up and down the country. Read more... |
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