Opera Reviews
theartsdesk at the Buxton International Festival - power and glory in early VerdiFriday, 12 July 2024
Buxton International Festival offers one thundering success, one uneasy compromise and one surprisingly enjoyable experience, in its three mainstage operas this year. Read more... |
Orlando, Academy of Ancient Music, Cummings, Barbican review - madly beautifulTuesday, 02 July 2024
The Academy of Ancient Music, which celebrates its “golden anniversary” this season, got going just as Handel’s operas began to leave the library at last and reclaim the stage. There they continue to flourish, dazzle and move – which makes any concert performance of them a slightly bittersweet pleasure. Read more... |
Le nozze di Figaro, Garsington Opera review - fine-tuned telling it as it isSaturday, 29 June 2024
“Tradition is sloppiness,” Mahler the opera conductor is credited with saying. But in the case of old master John Cox’s long-serving Garsington production of the greatest of operatic comedes, not if it’s refreshed with the subtlest insights in to human tensions and frailties. Read more... |
Giulio Cesare, Glyndebourne review - every number a winner from dazzling revival castMonday, 24 June 2024
How much better can a classic get? Sebastian Scotney more or less asked the same question on theartsdesk the last time Giulio Cesare returned in triumph to Glyndebourne. I never saw David McVicar’s justly famous production of what has to be Handel’s most consistently inspired opera live before, but I wonder if every single number can ever have been applauded, as it was last night. Read more... |
theartsdesk at Smetanova Litomyšl - three fascinating operas and a masterpiece superbly vindicatedSaturday, 22 June 2024
What did they put in the water of Czechia’s central Bohemia/Moravia borderlands? From south to north there's Mahler’s birthplace in Kalište and the city of his youth, Jihlava; the Polička tower where Martinů was born; and finally the Litomyšl brewery which was Smetana’s first home (further east, Janáček and Freud were born six kilometres apart). Read more... |
Il Trittico, Welsh National Opera review - another triumph for a hard-pressed companyMonday, 17 June 2024
It’s somehow typical of the Welsh National Opera I’ve known now for the best part of sixty years that it should confront its current funding difficulties with brilliant productions of two of the more challenging works in the repertory. Read more... |
The Merry Widow, Glyndebourne review - fun and frolics in the EmbassyTuesday, 11 June 2024
Why would anyone want to stage a work like The Merry Widow in this day and age? Silly question. It’s the music, stupid. Of course, it’s an entertaining story and there are some good jokes. But I'd bet that if Heuberger had composed the music to this libretto, as he started doing, instead of Franz Lehár, who took it on afterwards, I wouldn't now be writing about Cal McCrystal’s new Glyndebourne production, or anyone else’s for that matter. Read more... |
Giulio Cesare, Blackwater Valley Opera Festival review - characterful, lustrous Handel on paradeTuesday, 04 June 2024
Recreating Handel’s Egypt with a first-rate cast on the summer opera scene could have been the exclusive domain of Glyndebourne, bringing back its revival of David McVicar’s celebrated Giulio Cesare in July. Yet over the Irish sea, in the grounds of a castle with exquisite gardens above the lushly wooded valley of the river Blackwater, they’ve pulled it off. This is a singular triumph of which Caesar would be proud. Read more... |
Tosca, Opera Holland Park review - passion and populismWednesday, 29 May 2024
Set in a tensely polarised Roman neighbourhood, with an election in the offing and radicals scrapping with reactionaries under poster-plastered walls, Stephen Barlow’s smart update of Tosca from 1800 to 1968 might have felt like a double dose of period-piece on its first outing at Opera Holland Park in 2008. Strongly cast and crisply delivered, this polished and gripping revival gives us Puccini the prophet as well as the pot-boiler. Read more... |
Die Zauberflöte, Glyndebourne review - cornucopia of visual inventiveness eclipses everything elseMonday, 20 May 2024
Five years after it first clattered onto the Glyndebourne stage, André Barbe and Renaud Doucet’s visually exuberant Die Zauberflöte – featuring everything from dancing carcasses to a monster made out of blue-and-white crockery – continues to dazzle as much as it entertains. Read more... |
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