Opera Reviews
From the House of the Dead, Royal Opera review - Janáček's prison oddity prompts hot tearsThursday, 08 March 2018
A political prisoner is brutally initiated into the life of a state penitentiary, and leaves it little over 90 minutes later. Four inmates reveal their brutal past histories with elliptical strangeness - each would need an episode of something like Orange is the New Black - and two plays staged during a holiday for the convicts take up about a quarter of the action. Read more...
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A Midsummer Night's Dream, ENO review - shiveringly beautiful BrittenFriday, 02 March 2018
“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” Hang on a minute, Tytania, there are no flowers. Instead, as Britten’s ominously low strings slither and tremble up and down the scale, the curtain rises on a huge, near-acidic emerald green hilly slope lying against a seemingly fathomless International Klein Blue cyclorama broken only by a glowing crescent moon. Except it’s not just a hill: it’s also a giant bed; the perfect bed, in fact, in which to spend one wonderful midsummer’s night. Read more... |
Dialogues des Carmélites, Guildhall School review - calm and humane drama of faithTuesday, 27 February 2018
One question dominates any staging of Dialogues des Carmélites. How will the production team deal with the cruelty and tragedy in the 12th and last scene when all of the nuns, one by one, go through with their vow of martyrdom and calmly proceed to the guillotine, singing the Salve Regina? Read more... |
La Vie Parisienne, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire review - vintage champagne in a new bottleFriday, 23 February 2018
Don’t you just love that new concert hall smell? Read more... |
Dead Man Walking, Barbican review - timely and devastating meditation on human violence and forgivenessWednesday, 21 February 2018
You have to wonder why it has taken this long. Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking premiered in San Francisco back in 2000 and has since been performed over 300 times across the world, staged everywhere from Cape Town to Copenhagen. Read more... |
Flight, Scottish Opera review - poignant and powerful, this production soarsMonday, 19 February 2018
Inspired by the astonishing true story of Mehran Karimi Nasseri, the Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years, Jonathan Dove’s Flight is a humorous, touching, uplifting yet profoundly poignant study into human relationships, interactions and emotions. This is opera buffa for the modern age – relevant, relatable, lighthearted and often downright silly, but still revealing some very pertinent truths. Read more... |
Iolanthe, English National Opera review - bright and beautiful G&S for allWednesday, 14 February 2018
Very well, so ENO's latest Gilbert and Sullivan spectacular was originally to have been The Gondoliers directed by Richard Jones and conducted by Mark Wigglesworth. Read more... |
Un ballo in maschera, Opera North review - decent, no moreMonday, 12 February 2018
You’d expect a degree of mischief and bafflement in an opera about mistaken identity, closing with a scene set at a masked ball. But Tim Albery’s new Opera North Un ballo in maschera is confusing for the wrong reasons, its shortcomings all the more irritating compared how good the performance actually sounds. Read more... |
Tosca, Welsh National Opera review - ticking the traditionalist boxesSaturday, 10 February 2018
Opera-lovers: if you’ve finally had enough of the wheelchairs and syringes, the fifties skirts and heels, the mobile phones and the white box sets, and the rest of the symbolic paraphernalia of the right-on modern opera production, pop along to the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff and catch up with Michael Blakemore’s... Read more... |
Carmen, Royal Opera review - clever concept, patchy singing, sexy dancingWednesday, 07 February 2018
Roll up, dépêchez-vous, for Carmen the - what? Circus? Vaudeville/music-hall/cabaret? Opéra-ballet, post-Rameau? Not, certainly, a show subject to the kind of updated realism which has been applied by just about every production other than the previous two at Covent Garden. Read more... |
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