sat 19/07/2025

Opera Reviews

Oedipus Rex, Scottish Opera, Edinburgh International Festival 2024 review - beautifully uncomplex

Miranda Heggie

Immersive opera such as this can be tricky to pull off, but the magic of Roxana Haines’s new production of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex lies in its simplicity, letting the material organically weave around the audience without overcomplications or deliberately clever trickery.

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Prom 24, The Fairy Queen, Les Arts Florissants/Le Jardin des Voix, Agnew review - hip-hop hornpipes

Boyd Tonkin

“One charming night gives more delight than a hundred lucky days”. So claims one of the gorgeous (and, in this case, risqué) numbers that stud Purcell’s “semi-opera” The Fairy Queen like sequins on a flamboyant party gown.

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Tristan und Isolde, Glyndebourne review - infinite love at white heat

David Nice

Richard Strauss described conducting Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde for the first time as "the most wonderful day of my life". It’s understandable that Glyndebourne’s music director Robin Ticciati should wish to improve upon “wonderful” in conducting a concert staging in 2021 with "miraculous" in charge of the full Nikolaus Lehnhoff production. I challenge anyone to cite another Tristan more alert to every possibility – the electrifying, the ferocious, the transcendental.

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The Butterfly House, Clonter Opera review - Puccini in biographical briefs

Robert Beale

For 50 years Clonter Opera, the song-on-the-farm project in rural Cheshire, has been encouraging would-be opera stars by giving them a chance to perform in undemanding conditions under the guidance of experienced professional.

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ll Segreto di Susanna/Pagliacci, Opera Holland Park review - on with the motley, out with the fags

Boyd Tonkin

Could “Cav and Pag” give way to “Sue and Pag”? As a double-bill partner for Leoncavallo’s backstage shocker Pagliacci, Opera Holland Park have scheduled not the standard Cavalleria Rusticana but an entirely different one-act work. Premiered in Munich in 1909, Wolf-Ferrari’s Il Segreto di Susanna plays droll, even farcical, variations on the same theme of male jealousy as newlywed Count Gil suspects his bride Countess Susanna of having an affair. 

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theartsdesk at the Buxton International Festival - power and glory in early Verdi

Robert Beale

Buxton International Festival offers one thundering success, one uneasy compromise and one surprisingly enjoyable experience, in its three mainstage operas this year.

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Orlando, Academy of Ancient Music, Cummings, Barbican review - madly beautiful

Boyd Tonkin

The Academy of Ancient Music, which celebrates its “golden anniversary” this season, got going just as Handel’s operas began to leave the library at last and reclaim the stage. There they continue to flourish, dazzle and move – which makes any concert performance of them a slightly bittersweet pleasure.

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Le nozze di Figaro, Garsington Opera review - fine-tuned telling it as it is

David Nice

“Tradition is sloppiness,” Mahler the opera conductor is credited with saying. But in the case of old master John Cox’s long-serving Garsington production of the greatest of operatic comedes, not if it’s refreshed with the subtlest insights in to human tensions and frailties.

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Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne review - every number a winner from dazzling revival cast

David Nice

How much better can a classic get? Sebastian Scotney more or less asked the same question on theartsdesk the last time Giulio Cesare returned in triumph to Glyndebourne. I never saw David McVicar’s justly famous production of what has to be Handel’s most consistently inspired opera live before, but I wonder if every single number can ever have been applauded, as it was last night.

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theartsdesk at Smetanova Litomyšl - three fascinating operas and a masterpiece superbly vindicated

David Nice

What did they put in the water of Czechia’s central Bohemia/Moravia borderlands? From south to north there's Mahler’s birthplace in Kalište and the city of his youth, Jihlava; the Polička tower where Martinů was born; and finally the Litomyšl brewery which was Smetana’s first home (further east, Janáček and Freud were born six kilometres apart).

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