Opera
David Nice
It all adds up to a cleverly interconnected triple bill and the perfect experience for five singers from the Royal Opera's Jette Parker Artists Programme. There are three losses, two of them deaths, only one mourned for, a baritone in all three operas and three other singers in two of them, plus dazzling, finely honed work from various small forces of the Britten Sinfonia under conductor Peggy Wu (also on the JPAP). The weak link has nothing to do with any of the performances, nor Talia Stern's surefooted direction, so let's get that out of the way first. I'd be surprised if Elizabeth Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
“Charges that no court has made will be shouted at my head.” And so it proves. Benjamin Britten’s fisherman Peter Grimes is damned before a note is sung – condemned not by a judge, but by his own community. Deborah Warner’s brutal 2022 staging, now back at the Royal Opera for its first revival, never lets us forget this. We don’t even see a courtroom. Instead, the Prologue plays out as a hallucinatory fantasy, a fever-dream in the mind of Grimes himself: his dead apprentice haunts his thoughts, while a mob of dark figures circle like hounds. Grimes is a tragedy of alienation, but this staging Read more ...
David Nice
Before last night's still-shocking saga of a downtrodden soul began, Southbank Artistic Director Mark Ball came on to tell us that while concerts were mere events, Multitudes, "our multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music", was offering experiences. Rachel Halliburton, who reviewed Bach's The Art of Fugue with acrobats, would agree; Bernard Hughes, though, found Messiaen's Turangalîla ruined by a "tiresome film". I felt the same last year about Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony burdened with a very tangential animation by the usually wondrous William Kentridge.At his best, Kentridge offers Read more ...
Simon Thompson
There’s something slightly odd about listening to Bluebeard’s Castle, Bartók’s great opera of darkness, on a sunlit spring afternoon. However, the sun streaming through the windows of Glasgow’s City Halls was the only thing wrong with this corker of a concert performance from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Elim Chan. And indeed, conductor Chan was the not-so-secret weapon in this concert’s success.Pacing is everything in this opera. The tension needs to heighten and steadily tighten as the successive doors are opened, becoming unbearable with the last one; yet the conductor needs Read more ...
Gerald Barry's Salome, NSO Ireland, Kuhn, National Concert Hall, Dublin review - funny-queasy genius
David Nice
You know to expect a crazy ride, especially when Gerald Barry, greatest living Wildean and wild one among composers, has flagged up his very unStraussian take on Salome with "I didn't want her to dance, so I thought...not "dance", but "type' "(there are three typewriters of varying ages at the front of the concert platform). Right at the start, with deliberately unwieldy unison galumphings, mostly strings and lower brass, you also know it's him by the style. But you can never second-guess the extraordinary turns, both funny and dark, often both at the same time, this utterly original riff on Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Just now, everything WNO does inevitably bears the mark of their Arts Council-imposed financial troubles, and this new Flying Dutchman directed by Jack Furness is no exception. It proceeds on a bare stage largely devoid even of props, the singers costumed in the most mundane modern street-wear, no sign of the sea or ships, nothing beyond a few mysterious period-clad Scandinavians far upstage and some neutral back projections on which the audience is invited - I suppose - to bring their imaginations to bear.Of course there’s a justifying concept. “Stripping everything away,” says the designer Read more ...
David Nice
Good Friday and the days before it are times to contemplate Bach's great passions - the St Matthew was performed at the Baden-Baden Easter Festival before I arrived with Klaus Mäkelä conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra - but not so much another powerful ritual. Britten's War Requiem seared the soul again this Good Friday with the profoundly impressive Joana Mallwitz conducting the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and it seemed like a masterpiece equal to Bach's. Not quite so much could be said of Wagner's Lohengrin, which I heard on Easter Sunday, though it has stretches of greatness and was Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
“Fear death by water,” says the fortune-teller in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. There were a few moments in Natalie Abrahami’s new production of The Turn of the Screw when I worried that the fine musicianship and otherwise smart direction in evidence all around might founder irrevocably beneath the sodden weight of its core conceit. For long sections, especially in the second act, the singers stand or splash around a waterlogged stage. Yes, the fatal lake of Bly that so attracts little Flora in Benjamin Britten’s 1954 opera (as in Henry James’s incomparably unsettling novella of 1898) Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Tamerlano, tyrannical Emperor of the Tartars, is a burger-munching boor with a golf-habit, a bulbous belly and a crashing disdain for other people’s sensitivities. In Orpha Phelan’s dynamic, gleefully idiosyncratic production of Handel’s 1724 opera, Trump’s shadow looms large, as Tamerlano tries to force Bajazet, Emperor of the Turks, to haggle for his freedom by offering up his daughter, Asteria, for Tamerlano’s sexual delight.The opera is one of many that Handel wrote as part of London’s craze for the Italian opera seria form – which featured multiple arias for its virtuoso singers – and Read more ...
Robert Beale
Harry Fehr’s directorial take on The Cunning Little Vixen is a sound one: keep it simple. Together with set and costume designer Nicky Shaw (with whom he worked on a memorable Buxton International Festival production of La Sonnambula in 2023), lighting designer Mark Jonathan and movement director Ewan Jones, he brings Janáček’s everyday story of country life to the stage with a clarity and innocence that reflect the story’s origins as a newspaper cartoon strip.Of course, as with all good strips, the implications are what really counts: the animals, in the tale of a half-domesticated vixen who Read more ...
David Nice
In one of the loveliest operatic scores of all time, Dvořák makes cruel demands on his eponymous water nymph and the prince for whom she acquires a mortal soul, having them soar above the stave countless times in anguish or ecstasy. Irish soprano Jennifer Davis and American tenor Ryan Capozzo are both equal to the challenge. Unfortunately their characters are bent out of shape by director Netia Jones; the Prince is rendered one-dimensional, and Rusalka poisoning him rather than kissing him to death in the great final scene weakens its impact.
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David Nice
Have you ever witnessed both a Tristan and an Isolde physically plausible and vocally up to everything that Wagner throws at them, from violent cursing to heartbreaking tenderness? I hadn't until yesterday. At first it seemed as if Yuval Sharon's supposedly controversial production would smother Lise Davidsen's Isolde and Michael Spyres' Tristan in concepts and restrict them to a narrow curve set back from the front of the stage and hovering above it. Acoustically that seems to have been a challenge for those I know who were present at the Met, the orchestra supposedly overwhelming the Read more ...