sun 20/07/2025

Opera Reviews

La finta giardiniera, Glyndebourne

David Nice

There are two avenues down which to approach the well-kept flower beds of Mozart’s early operas. One is to be surprised how rarely the muse of fire which rages through Idomeneo, his first undisputed masterpiece, descends on a work composed just a few years earlier like La finta giardiniera (The Counterfeit Garden Girl), and that’s how I felt sitting through a performance of it for only the second time in my life.

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Ariadne auf Naxos, Royal Opera

David Nice

Can it really be 12 years since Antonio Pappano inaugurated his transformative era as the Royal Opera’s Music Director conducting Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos? Christof Loy’s production seemed so radical at the time.

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Tosca, Longborough Festival

stephen Walsh

For Longborough to open their new season with Tosca after last summer’s triumphant Wagner is to invoke Joseph Kerman’s famous diatribe against Puccini’s “shabby little shocker” in his fifties book Opera as Drama. Kerman used Wagner’s theories to pick holes in Puccini’s at times flagrant theatricality: which only goes to show what an untheoretical thing opera can be.

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Don Quichotte, Grange Park Opera

Sebastian Scotney

Grange Park Opera has a strong penchant for French repertoire, and has been valiant, consistent and highly imaginative in presenting it ever since 1998, when Wasfi Kani and Michael Moody first started inviting opera-goers to the unique setting of a Greek revival house in the Hampshire countryside. This year's production  of Massenet's 1909 Don Quichotte is the eighth French work which the company has produced. Samson et Dalila next year will be the ninth.

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The Cunning Little Vixen, Garsington Opera

David Nice

Rolling hills with beech-rich woods sloping upwards from a wide valley: the Wormsley Estate has more than a little in common with glorious Hukvaldy in Moravia, where Janáček was born and ended his life, and where in old age he once again saw "his" vixen. With an admirable independence of mind that seriously underrated director Daniel Slater has gone against the grain inside the fabulous pavilion where Garsington’s operas now resound.

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Glyndebourne: the Untold History, BBC Four

Adam Sweeting

Celebrating the 80th anniversary of opera at Glyndebourne, this 90-minute documentary was fascinating when it delved into the house's history, but started to lose its bearings when it came back to the present day and dwelt at laborious length over this season's new production of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. It was as if nobody could decide what sort of film to make, so they made two and cut chunks of them together.

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Crowd Out/Death Actually, Spitalfields Music Summer Festival

David Nice

“I feel so alone I could cry”. As the keynote of Adam Smallbone’s Passion in the breathtaking third series of Rev, that unspoken sentiment provided a passacaglia bass line to the failure of St Saviour’s.

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The Fall of the House of Usher, Welsh National Opera

stephen Walsh

The Fall of the House of Usher is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s mistier tales, and although it has been turned into opera a few times, there are obvious difficulties. Debussy struggled for a decade to materialise a drama out of its haunting, neurotic atmosphere, and in the end failed, I would argue, because he was unable to distance himself enough from the central characters to construct a stage action about them.

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Manon Lescaut, Royal Opera

David Nice

Puccini’s racy first masterpiece, like its successor La bohème, should feel like an opera of two halves – the first full of youthful exuberance, the second darker and ultimately tragic. The contrast here, alas, was between vivacious performers and a sombre, sometimes confused updating by Jonathan Kent which too often dwarfed or zapped their better efforts.

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The Pearl Fishers, English National Opera

Kimon Daltas

Before curtain-up on the opening night of this revival of Penny Woolcock’s production of The Pearl Fishers, ENO's head of casting arrived on stage with a microphone. No doubt delightful company in person, he was an unwelcome sight here. Sophie Bevan had a stomach bug, he explained – the disappointment was palpable. But she'd be bravely singing anyway – grateful applause broke out.

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