Opera
Viennese whirl
‘First performance: Vienna, October 3, 1880’ declares the programme for Opera della Luna’s new production of Johann Strauss’s The Queen’s…
Grimes triumphant
‘Peter Grimes!’ Ranked high above us in the Usher Hall — a mob smelling blood, hot for the kill —…
Classy and classic
The Edinburgh International Festival began with a double helping of incest. Curiously, Greek — Mark-Anthony Turnage’s East End retelling of…
Strong stuff
The strings sweep upwards, the horns surge, and Leoncavallo’s Zaza throws itself into your arms. We don’t know it yet,…
New kid on the block
The new Grange Park Opera at Horsley is amazing, as everyone who visits it must agree. In less than a…
Risk assessment
Someone at the Buxton International Festival had a wry smile on their face when programming this year’s trio of operas.…
Dressed to thrill
Mitridate, re di Ponto was Mozart’s fifth opera, written and first produced when he was 14 years old. Absolutely amazing.…
Roll over Beethoven
If you want to see an opera director kicking a genius when they’re down — and I mean really sticking…
Twin peaks
In an essay called ‘Wagner’s fluids’, Susan Sontag concludes, ‘The depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable…
Art of darkness
Brett Dean’s new opera for Glyndebourne is a big-hearted romantic comedy, sunny and life-affirming. Only joking — this is contemporary…
Myths and morals
Handel’s Semele, one of the most enjoyable operas (or opera-oratorio, if you insist) in the repertoire, is, in its upshot,…
Music matters
The ancient Greeks had a word for it —katabasis, descending into the depths, to the underworld itself, in search of…
Death wish
Anyone who thinks they have experienced absolute boredom, or even doubts that such a state can exist, should go to…
False start
When a composer begins an opera, they create a world. You don’t need a full-scale overture: the tear-stained violins that…
Mild things
English Touring Opera is playing safe this spring, with Tosca and Patience, and was rewarded, in Cambridge at least, with…
Stand and deliver
Some opera-lovers prefer concert performances to full stagings. I don’t. It’s that whole Gesamtkunstwerk thing: opera needs to be seen…
Fallen angel
The Adèsives were out in force at Covent Garden last Monday for the UK première of their hero’s third opera,…
Take a bow
Monteverdi 450 — the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists’ tour of his three operas to 33 cities across two…
Country pleasures
The English weren’t the first cowpat composers. Jean-Philippe Rameau raised the art of frolicking in the fields to such heights…
Blowing the bloody doors off
As we waited for curtain-up on Scottish Opera’s new production of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle a member of staff walked out…
Death becomes her
Opera is littered with the bodies of abandoned women. Step over Dido and Gilda, and you’ll still stumble into Donna…
Denial has rarely looked so good
Ceci n’est pas une Partenope. Forget the warring classical kingdoms of Naples and Cumae: this is surrealist Paris in the…
Fatal distraction
I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal…
Scottish power
‘Perhaps in this world nothing ever happens without purpose,’ sings old, blind King Arkel in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and…
Scottish power
‘Perhaps in this world nothing ever happens without purpose,’ sings old, blind King Arkel in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and…
