Opera
Blowing hot and cold
The opera director David Alden has never been one to tread the straight and narrow. Something kinky would emerge, I’m…
Carmen v. Carmen
It’s been a busy operatic week, with a nearly great concert performance of Parsifal in Birmingham on Sunday (reviewed by…
Lost boys
In Beryl Bainbridge’s novel An Awfully Big Adventure the producer Meredith Potter issues a doughty injunction on the subject of…
Polite pillage
Forget the pollsters and political pundits — English National Opera called it first and called it Right when it programmed…
Ways of hearing
‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed…
Triple triumph
Three staples of the Italian repertoire, performed and seen in very different circumstances, have confirmed my view that they deserve…
Off colour
Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal…
Falling down
This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50…
Beauty and the bleak
The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since,…
Hit parade
Before the jukebox musical, back when Mamma Mia!, Jersey Boys and Viva Forever! were still dollar-shaped glints in an as-yet-unborn…
The price of pleasure
Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one…
Gone girl
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson loved little girls. He loved to tell them stories, he loved to feed them jam, he loved…
From one extreme to another
When is an opera not an opera? How much can you strip and peel away, or extend and graft on…
Twin peaks
Is there a more beautiful aria than ‘O mio babbino caro’ from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi? There are more overwhelming moments…
Talent show
La Donna del Lago, based on a poem by Sir Walter Scott, is one of the nine serious, dramatic operas…
Master class
ENO’s new production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is a triumph about which only the most niggling of reservations…
Farewell, ENO
It’s easy to forget what a mess of an art form opera once was. For its first 100 years it…
Crime and punishment
In one of the more peculiar concerts that I have been to at the Royal Festival Hall, Vladimir Jurowski conducted…
Heads will roll
Who on earth could have predicted that a hoary old operatic melodrama set in revolutionary France would find resonance in…
To hell and back
What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s…
Where to start…
Whether by chance or bold design, the Royal Opera’s two Christmas shows were written at precisely the same moment, between…
Delusions of grandeur
Any adequate performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the first night of the Royal Opera’s production was at least that,…
A star is born
The Royal Academy of Music’s end-of-term opera can always be looked forward to because it never disappoints: the repertoire is…
Rameau resurrected
The poor French. When we think of classical music, we always think of the Germans. It’s understandable. Instinctive. Ingrained. But…
From the sacred to the secular
Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the…
