Opera Reviews
Paul Bunyan, Welsh National Youth Opera, CardiffSaturday, 24 August 2013
Reading through WH Auden’s libretto for Britten’s first stage work – the so-called operetta Paul Bunyan – it’s sometimes hard to decide whether the intention was to participate in the great American dream or to make fun of it. In 1941 both artists were living in the United States and writing for Americans, who famously didn’t take to the work’s blend of folksy condescension and sententious eloquence. The combination is still faintly queasy. Read more...
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Prom 45: The Midsummer Marriage, BBC Symphony Orchestra, DavisSaturday, 17 August 2013
Jeremy Paxman’s beard may have been a wonder and a talking point for five days, but Michael Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage beats it by almost 60 years. Ecstatic, visionary, energetic music, yes indeed. But, oh, the composer’s libretto! The Magic Flute, T. S. Read more... |
Fidelio, Opéra de Lyon, Festival Theatre, EdinburghTuesday, 13 August 2013
When first seen at Serge Dorny’s Opéra de Lyon in March-April this year, American Gary Hill’s unusual vision of Beethoven’s Fidelio could be recognised immediately as concept opera: drama where a director’s “idea” largely takes over the story. Hill directs (up to a point), and conceived the mesmerising projections that dominated the stage (realised, with jaw-dropping skill, by his technical assistant). Read more... |
Billy Budd, Glyndebourne Festival OperaSunday, 11 August 2013
It’s not a crowd-pleaser like Albert Herring, nor wittily fanciful like A Midsummer Night’s Dream or macabre like The Turn of the Screw and certainly not the classic that Peter Grimes has become, and until three years ago Glyndebourne had never even staged Britten’s Billy Budd. But Michael Grandage’s 2010 production was a sea-changer. Read more... |
Prom 29: Tannhäuser, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, RunniclesMonday, 05 August 2013
On the one occasion I went to Bayreuth, I made the mistake of seeing The Flying Dutchman and Lohengrin after the best of Ring cycles. At the Proms we’ve had a week of serious Wagnerian withdrawal symptoms, so Tannhäuser was never going to feel like too much or too little of a good thing. Read more... |
Prom 20: Götterdämmerung, Staatskapelle Berlin, BarenboimMonday, 29 July 2013
And so Wotan’s ravens flew home and at the twilight’s last gleaming the immortals were consumed by fire and water. All was finally and irrevocably redeemed by the power of love, and the most beautiful of all the leitmotifs in Wagner’s Ring rolled out across the Albert Hall like a benediction. It was a defining moment in Proms history, no doubt, and was greeted with a few moments of perfect - and I mean perfect - silence. Read more... |
Prom 19: Tristan und Isolde, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BychkovSunday, 28 July 2013
Such has been the justifiable flow of superlatives this week about the Berlin Staatskapelle's Ring conducted by Barenboim, the centrepiece of the BBC Proms' Wagner bicentenary celebration, it would have been easy to forget that the 2013 Proms season contains not just those four, but seven complete Wagner operas. Read more... |
Prom 18: Siegfried, Staatskapelle Berlin, BarenboimSaturday, 27 July 2013
The transformative power of the Royal Albert Hall at Proms-time never ceases to amaze me. Read more... |
Road Rage, Garsington OperaThursday, 25 July 2013
Garsington Opera, now based at John Paul Getty’s countrified home, the Wormsley Estate near Henley, has nipped a leaf out of Glyndebourne’s book and embarked on its first full-blooded Community Opera: a far cry from Vivaldi and Rossini, but not from Janáček (Garsington will stage The Cunning Little Vixen next season). Read more... |
Prom 15: Die Walküre, Staatskapelle Berlin, BarenboimWednesday, 24 July 2013
Things may be falling apart, a storm now rages but new broods of humans and demigoddesses have been fathered by chief god Wotan, who has undergone a Doctor Who like transformation from Iain Paterson into Bryn Terfel. Read more... |
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