Opera Reviews
The Pirates of Penzance, English National Opera review - fresh energy in clear-sighted G&SSaturday, 07 December 2024
“Comedy is a serious thing,” quoth David Garrick. Gilbert and Sullivan knew it, and so does Mike Leigh, having bequeathed to ENO a clear and unfussy Pirates of Penzance. It does renewed honour to Victorian genius in Sarah Tipple’s freshly-cast revival. Most striking of all, perhaps, is how seriously conductor Natalie Murray Beale takes each musically rich number, vindicating Sullivan’s reputation as more than just a tunesmith to match Gilbert’s endlessly sharp and funny words. Read more... |
Rigoletto, Irish National Opera / Murrihy, Collins, NCH Dublin review - greatness everywhereMonday, 02 December 2024
How many Rigolettos have regular operagoers among you sat through where there wasn’t some major defect, in either the production or the three major roles? Here, there is none. INO’s jester and Duke are well cast, its Gilda supernaturally perfect in music and acting, while Julien Chavaz’s production, despite a few passing irritations, adds up to a coherent and disciplined whole. INO Artistic Director Fergus Sheil keeps Verdi's vivid music theatre on the move. Read more... |
The Elixir of Love, English National Opera review - a tale of two halvesSaturday, 16 November 2024
Sparkling Italian comic opera might have been just the tonic at this time. Trouble is, the bar was set so high recently by Wexford Festival Opera’s Le convenienze e inconvenienze teatrali, aka Viva la Mamma, that this better known, less malleable if more romantic Donizetti comedy came across as flat, one-dimensional and not very funny (I laughed out loud once; maybe I need to get out less). Which is a shame, because the singers deserved better. Read more... |
The Sound Voice Project, Linbury Theatre review - an art installation that has strayed into an opera houseSaturday, 16 November 2024
What does it mean to have a voice? And what does it mean to lose it? Those are the questions the award-winning Sound Voice Project has explored – through research, collaboration and live performance – since its beginnings in 2016. The latest incarnation of composer Hannah Conway’s project is as “immersive digital opera performance installation”. Read more... |
The Tales of Hoffmann, Royal Opera review - three-headed monster feels baggier than everFriday, 08 November 2024
Having all but sunk one seemingly unassailable opéra comique, Bizet’s Carmen, director Damiano Michieletto goes some way to helping out another with so many problems. Not far enough, alas, but the chosen edition, with its reams of recitative (mostly not by Offenbach), doesn’t help. Nor does the theme of women as either dolls, angels or devils. The real Hoffmann did it all so much better. Read more... |
Rigoletto, English National Opera review - another hit for Miller's MobThursday, 31 October 2024
How we used to mock those stuck-in-the-mud opera houses that wheeled out the same moth-eaten production of some box-office favourite decade after decade. Well, Jonathan Miller’s 1950s New York mafiosi version of Verdi’s Rigoletto first arrived on stage in 1982, after The Godfather (Parts I and II) but well before The Sopranos. For ENO at the Coliseum, Elaine Tyler-Hall has now directed its 14th revival. Read more... |
theartsdesk at Wexford Festival Opera - let's make three operasWednesday, 30 October 2024
Name three operas framing dramas within, and you’d probably come up with Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges. You might be harder pressed to come up with three more, but Wexford Festival Opera has done just that, theming this year’s triptych of rarities in the shape of never less than interesting, if often dramatically flawed, comedies by Donizetti, Mascagni and Stanford as “Theatre Within Theatre”. Read more... |
Albert Herring, Scottish Opera review - fun, frivolity, and fine music-makingFriday, 25 October 2024
Having premiered at the Lammermuir Festival earlier this year, Daisy Evans’s new production of Britten’s Albert Herring is a gently funny and sweetly nostalgic telling of what’s essentially a coming of age comedy. In fact, the 80s costumes and the characters’ cute quirks wouldn't have felt out of place in a John Hughes movie – if Hughes set films in Suffolk. Read more... |
Le nozze di Figaro, The Mozartists, Page, Cadogan Hall review - cogency, intelligence and reverenceWednesday, 23 October 2024
Ten years ago, Ian Page launched his and the Mozartists’ (then Classical Opera’s) remarkable endeavour to play music by WA Mozart 250 years after it was written, starting with a programme of material from 1765 by eight-year-old Mozart, and his contemporaries. Read more... |
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Opera North review - one of the best and funniestMonday, 14 October 2024
Martin Duncan’s 2008 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream remains one of the best and funniest things Opera North has ever done – back now again (it was also seen in 2013-14), in the company’s autumn season of revivals. Read more... |
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