Opera
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…
Don’t look now
Mozart’s first great opera, Idomeneo, is not often performed, and perhaps it’s better that way. It should be seen as…
Russian revelation
Anyone who thinks opera singers and orchestral players are overworked should spare a thought for the Mariinsky Opera on its…
Sexy ladies
This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth…
Screwed up
We all know that ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, but nowhere is this more reliably (and violently)…
Blood and lust
Virtue, hide thyself! The Coronation of Poppea opens with a warning and closes with a love duet for a concubine…
Golden hearted
Puccini’s La fanciulla del West is, one suspects, one of those works that modern audiences struggle to keep a straight…
