Opera Reviews
Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne review - no weak linkMonday, 11 June 2018
What a great show, on every level. David McVicar’s Glyndebourne production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, originally staged in 2005, and in its third revival this year, has a cast without a weak link, and never fails to draw in the audience to the work’s cycles of power, suffering, death and intermittent triumph... Read more... |
Un ballo in maschera, Grange Park Opera review – singing out against the American grainMonday, 11 June 2018
Stumble across Grange Park Opera’s new brick-clad “Theatre in the Woods”, nestled amid a labyrinth of gardens and orchards next to the rambling Tudor pile of West Horsley Place in Surrey, and on a mild June evening you may feel as if you have fallen into some Home Counties version of a magic-realist novel. Read more... |
Lohengrin, Royal Opera review - swan mystery musically illuminatedFriday, 08 June 2018
It's awfully long for a fairytale in which a mystery prince helps a damsel in distress, and she asks him the question she shouldn't. Myth tends to go deeper, as Wagner did in The Ring of the Nibelung after Lohengrin. Here he captures the magic of transformation and transcendence, but in between there's too much hard-to-stage pomp. Read more... |
La finta semplice, Classical Opera, QEH review - consummate musicianship stokes early MozartThursday, 07 June 2018
You can always be sure of impeccable casting and spirited playing as Ian Page takes his Classical Opera through Mozart year by year. Just don't expect more than the glimmer of genius to come in 1768, though. Read more... |
Der fliegende Holländer, Longborough Festival review - stand and deliver on an empty stageThursday, 07 June 2018
Brilliant and innovative though it is in many respects, The Flying Dutchman is by no means a straightforward piece to stage. It’s an odd, sometimes uncomfortable mixture of the genre and the epic. At Sadler’s Wells in the sixties they had a little ship and a big ship that hove into view, a fishing village, sailors with tankards and striped shirts, and girls at looms. Read more... |
Capriccio, Garsington Opera review - a classy evening with words and musicMonday, 04 June 2018
Like the comedies of Mozart – the genius the artistic milieu depicted in Capriccio seems to be waiting for, if its original 1770s setting is observed – the more conversational operas of Richard Strauss depend far more than one often realises on conducting that sets a stylish, buoyant pace. Read more... |
Così fan tutte, Opera Holland Park review - the pain behind the prettinessSaturday, 02 June 2018
A proper production of Così fan tutte should make you feel as if the script for a barrel-scraping Carry On film has been hi-jacked by Shakespeare and Chekhov – working as a team. The story is so silly (even nasty), the music so sublime. Read more... |
Die Zauberflöte, Garsington Opera review - visually stimulating, conceptually confusingFriday, 01 June 2018
Something is afoot at Garsington this season. Walking past the lake you might just catch sight of three strange figures in the distance – white-clad pawns engaged in a solemn game of human chess. Continue towards the auditorium and, somewhere among the topiary, there’s a splash of colour. A man with the cap and long red robes of an Inquisitor stands silently and contemplates the statuary. Opera, once again it seems, has fallen through the looking glass. Read more... |
Der Rosenkavalier, Glyndebourne - detailed acting, great singingMonday, 21 May 2018
If Hugo von Hofmannsthal's libretto for Richard Strauss in their joint "comedy for music" is the apogee of elaborately referenced dialogue and stage directions in opera, Richard Jones's realisation - for all that it throws out much of the original rulebook - may well be the most rigorously detailed production on the operatic stage today. Read more... |
Madama Butterfly, Glyndebourne review - perverse staging, outstanding castSunday, 20 May 2018
Puccini’s heroines and the rough treatment he hands out to them have come in for plenty of opprobrium over the years. Read more... |
Pages
Subscribe to theartsdesk.com
Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 10,000 pieces, we're asking for £3.95 per month or £30 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.
To take an annual subscription now simply click here.
And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?
latest in today
CD: Imogen Heap - The Music of Harry Potter and the Cursed C...
London’s Palace Theatre this week celebrated the thousandth...
They Shall Not Grow Old, BBC Two review - Peter Jackson...
Peter Jackson has form when it comes to re-examining cinema history. In 1995 he made Forgotten Silver, a...
Robert Hastie: 'a seam of love runs through the play...
Robert Hastie is a little late for our meeting. Directing ...
LSO, Roth, Barbican - not enough pathos, but a remarkable st...
Missa in Angustiis. Mass in troubled times. There was a logic in...
Edward Burne-Jones, Tate Britain review - time for a rethink...
When, in 1853, Edward Burne-Jones (or Edward Jones as he then was) went up to Exeter College, Oxford, it could hardly have been expected that the...
CD: Liela Moss - My Name is Safe in Your Mouth
My Name is Safe in Your Mouth takes off with “Above You, Around You”, its fourth track. Up to that point, progress has been stately....
The Silver Tassie, BBCSO, Barbican review - a bracing memori...
In a week of flickering memorial candles and cascading poppies we’ve all been asked to contemplate the pity of war – to remember and to seek...
Dramatic Exchanges review - a brilliant slice of theatre his...
Dramatic Exchanges is a dazzling array of correspondence, stretching over more than a century, between...
Reissue CDs Weekly: Jazz on a Summer's Day
When Jazz on a Summer's Day was first seen in American cinemas in March 1960, it showed that seeing popular music live could be a leisure...