Puccini
Turandot, Royal Opera review - spectacle and sound wow in this significant revivalTuesday, 21 March 2023
Nearly 40 years old, Andrei Serban’s Royal Opera Turandot feels like a gilded relic (I felt like a relic myself on learning that my writer neighbour wasn’t born when I saw Gwyneth Jones as the ice princess in 1984). Yet so too, outwardly, did... Read more... |
La bohème, Glyndebourne Tour review - Death and the Parisienne doing the roundsFriday, 14 October 2022
The sopranos are Ethiopian-Italian and Hispanic-American, the tenor Uzbek, the baritones South African (no EU principals, but it seems you can't have everything). This is opera at its best: the cream of international singers coming together to make... Read more... |
Tosca, English National Opera review - a tale of two erasSaturday, 01 October 2022
Rome, 14/15 June 1800: the specifics of the original Sardou melodrama are preserved in Puccini’s thriller mixing love, lust, religion and tyranny. Many productions move forward in time, and sometimes change the place, with ease: after all, feudalist... Read more... |
La rondine, If Opera review - a bold opening gambit from a company changing the business of operaSaturday, 27 August 2022
Covid has been devastating for all the arts, but especially opera – the riskiest and most expensive gamble of the lot. And it doesn’t seem to be anywhere near done yet. On one memorable night this summer the number of covers stepping into principal... Read more... |
Margot La Rouge/Le Villi, Opera Holland Park review – Parisian fancies and Black Forest gâteauFriday, 22 July 2022
Take an opera newbie along to Opera Holland Park’s double bill of rarities and they may have both their worst fears and their highest hopes confirmed. Outlandish plotting, overwrought melodrama and preposterous, supernatural stage business abounds.... Read more... |
Zingari/Tosca Suite, Opera Rara, Rizzi, Cadogan Hall review - symphonic mastery and fluent hokumSaturday, 04 December 2021
Two major composers took Pushkin’s narrative poem The Gypsies as the subject for two very different operas. The 19 year old Rachmaninov in 1892 had inspiration but not much sense of dramatic continuity; Leoncavallo in 1912, 20 years on from his... Read more... |
Madam Butterfly, Welsh National Opera review - decent performance, disagreeable contextWednesday, 29 September 2021
It’s easy enough to see the difficulty Madam Butterfly places your thinking director in. I share her pain. What the whirring brain will quickly see as a penetrating, or at least surface scratching, study of a whole repertoire of modern obsessions –... Read more... |
La bohème, Scottish Opera – pandemic PucciniMonday, 07 September 2020
Picture the scene. A vast steel gazebo covers a nondescript parking lot next to an industrial unit in Glasgow. With a clear plastic covering, it is the most rudimentary of shelters, sides open to admit the roar of the M8 and the wailing of sirens,... Read more... |
Ermonela Jaho, Stephen Maughan, Wigmore Hall review – emotional honesty in rare repertoireMonday, 03 February 2020
Wigmore Hall audiences don’t usually roar. But when a star soprano who has already made her mark at the world’s major opera houses pays a visit, they do. This was the Albanian-born and now New York-based soprano Ermonela Jaho’s debut at the hall, an... Read more... |
Edinburgh International Festival 2019: Bach's Multiple Concertos/ Manon Lescaut reviews - dancing harpsichords, perfect PucciniFriday, 23 August 2019
Puccini's and Abbé Prévost's glitter-seduced Manon Lescaut might have been inclined to linger longer in the salon of dirty old man Geronte if he'd served her up not his own madrigals but Bach's music for various harpsichords and ensemble. Five such... Read more... |
Manon Lescaut, Opera Holland Park review - attempt to empower commodified woman falls flatWednesday, 05 June 2019
"Waiting is always wearisome," declare the socialites as glitter-and-be-gay Manon Lescaut receives in the home of her nasty old "protector" Geronte. Despite the numerous sugar-plums Puccini weaves into his first fluent operatic masterpiece, waiting... Read more... |
Bernheim, Finley, LSO, Pappano, Barbican review - top Italians in second gearTuesday, 05 March 2019
Would Verdi and Puccini have composed more non-operatic music, had they thrived in a musical culture different to Italy's? Hard to say. What we do know is that they both became absolute masters of orchestration – Puccini rather quicker than Verdi,... Read more... |
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