ENO
alexandra.coghlan
A Martian, a Spitfire and a flatulent penguin are the unlikely ingredients for The Way Back Home, English National Opera’s first foray into the colourful world of children’s opera. And if those don’t sound like enticement enough, be reassured, at only 45 minutes long this really is a child-friendly taster of a genre that doesn’t always get the best press when it comes to accessibility.Amahl and the Night Visitors, L'enfant et les sortilèges, Hansel and Gretel, Where the Wild Things Are: opera for children might be a niche-of-a-niche, but over the centuries it has punched above its weight. Read more ...
David Nice
A great creative partnership like the one between composer John Adams and director Peter Sellars can endure the occasional wobble. In his peerless autobiography Hallelujah Junction Adams is frank about the information overload in Sellars’ premiere production of the millennial opera-oratorio woven around the birth of Christ, El Niño. His semi-staging of its companion piece The Gospel According to the Other Mary seen at the Barbican last year was, on the other hand, so pure, focused and perfect within Sellars’ usual semaphoring bounds, that I feared the full works might unleash excess again. Read more ...
David Nice
ENO may not always have matched the Royal Opera in the Great Puccini Voices stakes. But it's served up many of the classiest Mimìs, with Valerie Masterson, Mary Plazas and Elizabeth Llewellyn as top seamstresses. Californian former beauty queen Angel Blue, an acclaimed Musetta in the previous revival, now joins them. Unlike Llewellyn, still awaiting the international recognition she deserves, Blue is also among the favoured roster of young sopranos who, after an interregnum where we wondered where all the best black opera singers had gone - whether the spell of Leontyne Price and Jessye Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
To take Figaro – the ultimate operatic assault on class distinctions and social hierarchies – and set it on a giant revolve is a gesture as wilful as it is elegant. Not only are divisions of above and below-stairs dissolved in this steadily circling world, but also those of background and foreground, onstage and offstage. By the time the set’s rotations revealed two young valets with their trousers down, relieving themselves up against a palace wall, some few minutes into the Overture, Fiona Shaw had already won her audience and her case.When we first encountered Shaw’s production in 2011 – Read more ...
David Nice
So now it’s Minnie Get Your Gun from the director who brought us the gobsmackingly inventive Young Vic Annie (as in sharpshooter Oakley, not Little Orphan). Richard Jones’s subversive but still very human take on Irving Berlin discombobulated its American support and never made Broadway; but there’s little here that would rock the steadily progressive Met (home of La fanciulla del West’s 1910 premiere, with Enrico Caruso as “Dick Johnson” aka quickly repentant bandit Ramerrez). Girl should certainly go well in Santa Fe, sharing this production with ENO.Jones knows better in his maturity than Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Nicholas Hytner’s 1988 Magic Flute may have trilled its last at English National Opera, but judging by the wit, the joy and the energy on display last night it would be absolutely criminal to put the director’s even more elderly Xerxes out to pasture – the show that brought Handel back into fashion when it premiered in 1985.I was a little too busy being born to attend the production’s first outing, so came late to the party at its most recent outing in 2005. Revival director Michael Walling has refined his ideas since then, and there’s a lot less fuss and faff among designer David Fielding’s Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
From one great operatic storm to another. 2014 opened at English National Opera with David Alden’s Peter Grimes, gale-tossed and wet with sea-spray, and now the director turns his attention to Verdi’s Otello. Restlessly urgent, Edward Gardner’s opening assaulted us with timpani thunderclaps, stabbing into the silent auditorium as Otello himself would do just a few hours later. Tragedy is written into the musical fabric of Verdi’s opera, and in Alden’s new production we have a pervasive emotional horror that matches it blow for blow.2014 marks Alden’s 30th year working with ENO. Anyone feeling Read more ...
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. In the end, our goodwill was not called upon in the least, since Bevan's voice in her debut as Leïla was as strong and agile as ever.As the overture plays this production offers its most visually arresting moment, Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
A cheeky series of signs raised at the start of Phelim McDermott’s new Così fan tutte for English National Opera promise “Big Arias”, “Intrigue”, “Lust” and “Chocolate” (among other things). Big pledges, all. And almost all delivered by this witty, exuberant and quietly revisionist production of Mozart’s challenging comedy.The two young couples find themselves on holiday in Coney Island in the late 1950s, swapping twinsets, sensible flats and suppressed desires for the wild delights of the fair, where men wear lycra, women wear beards (and little else), and no fantasy or fetish remains Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s been a bloody week on the London stage. First Titus Andronicus maims and mutilates at the Globe, and now at English National Opera Frank McGuinness and Julian Anderson bring us a distillation of Sophocles’ three Theban plays, complete with eye-gouging and assorted hangings. But while Lucy Bailey found eloquent meaning in Shakespeare’s brutality, could Anderson do the same in this, his first opera?This is thoughtful, hard-fought art that resists immediate assimilation. Thebans is the considered response to recent ENO premieres – the baffling Sunken Garden and insubstantial Two Boys – Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The opening gyrations of Thomas Adès’s bluesy, schmoozy overture to Powder Her Face beckon you into a world of cheap sensation and excess. Accordion, saxophones and sizzle cymbal add their indecent, after-hours suggestions, and you have a microcosm in moments. Almost 20 years on from its premiere, Adès’s opera about the scandalous “Dirty Duchess” still has all the moves. What a shame then that these are obscured in the baggy, cavernous space of English National Opera’s latest field-trip venue – the University of Westminster’s Ambika P3 concrete bunker.Press notes might insist that the venue ( Read more ...
David Nice
If they asked me, I could write a book about the way one number in Richard Jones’s ENO production of Handel’s Rodelinda – the only duet, after 18 arias, and nearly two hours into the action – looks, sounds and moves. Because it doesn’t happen often in opera that all the elements combine for total musical theatre that stuns: in this case, two great voices – Rebecca Evans’s soprano and Iestyn Davies’s countertenor – at what sounds like the peak of their stylish careers, an orchestra under the exceptional Christian Curnyn totally fused with what’s happening on stage, and an ingenious set from Read more ...