Opera Reviews
Prom 28: D'Orazio, Clayton, BBCSO, OramoFriday, 08 August 2014
All kinds of narratives were at play in this Prom from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Sakari Oramo - and perhaps the truly adventurous programmer might have double-deployed Rory Kinnear, dispassionately chronicling Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, and taken us beyond the Overture and into the melodramas of Beethoven’s Incidental Music to Egmont. Read more... |
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Opera Holland ParkSunday, 03 August 2014
“What does opera have to say to the under-30s?” asked Alexandra Coghlan on theartsdesk yesterday. The question “what does opera have to say to the under-10s?” has had to wait until today. Read more... |
Prom 6: Der Rosenkavalier, LPO, TicciatiWednesday, 23 July 2014
If last year’s Ring cycle triumphantly proved that world-class opera can be done at the Albert Hall, this Rosenkavalier suggests that the less epic end of the repertoire isn’t such a sure thing. That is not to say that this performance was dud, far from it; rather that its few problems were venue related. Read more... |
La traviata, GlyndebourneFriday, 18 July 2014
Some of us have witnessed Traviatas where single stars were born: Angela Gheorghiu for Solti at the Royal Opera nearly 20 years ago springs quickest to mind. Some would claim a dream couple in Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon on peak form at Salzburg. Read more... |
Così fan tutte, European Opera Centre, RLPO, Pillot, St George’s Hall Concert Room, LiverpoolTuesday, 15 July 2014
One of the joys of attending an opera in the Concert Room at St George’s Hall, Liverpool, is the feeling that the audience is sitting in the set itself. Now one of the city’s foremost concert venues, this Victorian gem never ceases to amaze, even though it was reintroduced to active use in 2006 after extensive refurbishment. Read more... |
Diaghilev Festival Gala, London ColiseumMonday, 14 July 2014
Bakst’s harem drapes and Roerich’s smoking, steaming Polovtsian camp may not have had the most lavish of recreations. But the rest of this homage to Diaghilev shone with an exuberance and even a precision one would not have thought possible from previous seasons of what had once seemed like Andris Liepa’s Ballets Russes vanity project. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Buxton: Dvořák rarity, Gluck tercentenaryMonday, 14 July 2014
Buxton has gone Bohemian, digging into Dvořák’s treasure trove and celebrating Gluck’s tercentenary. The choice of Dvořák’s The Jacobin fits the Buxton Festival tradition of rooting out neglected works, since this has been unjustly overlooked since the first performance in 1889. It’s an irony that this makes Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice an unexpected choice, being ever-popular since 1762. Read more... |
The Queen of Spades, Grange Park OperaFriday, 11 July 2014
For my money, The Queen of Spades is one of the great nineteenth-century operas, a masterpiece of dramma per musica. There will always be pure spirits who cry “vulgar” at late Tchaikovsky. But the charge is absurd. Anyone with ears can hear the brilliance and refinement of this music, and anyone with feelings can sense Tchaikovsky’s love of his characters, all of them: the frail, the mad, the villainous, the beautiful and the damned. What more can you ask? Read more... |
The Golden Cockerel, Diaghilev Festival, London ColiseumThursday, 10 July 2014
Rimsky-Korsakov’s bizarre final fantasy, puffing up Pushkin's short verse-tale to unorthodox proportions, has done better in Britain than any of his other operatic fairy-tales. That probably has something to do with its appearance in Paris, six years after the composer’s death in 1908, courtesy of a brave new experiment marshalled by that chameleonic impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Read more... |
Pinnock's Passions, Handel's Garden, Sam Wanamaker PlayhouseTuesday, 08 July 2014
The latest in a series of "Pinnock’s Passions" concerts at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse saw the doyen of period instrument performance lead a delightful exploration of Handel the musical borrower, entitled "Handel’s Garden". As Trevor Pinnock writes in the programme notes, "throughout his life as a composer he had the habit of taking cuttings, transplanting and grafting from works old and new". Read more... |
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