Carmen

Choreographers! Enough with the reworkings of Carmen and Frankenstein!

6 April 2024 9:00 am

Carmen and Frankenstein are without a doubt two of the most over-worked tropes in our culture, the myths of the…

CSI: Seville

27 May 2023 9:00 am

Leave Bizet’s Carmen alone

18 June 2022 9:00 am

I’ve always felt uncomfortably ambivalent about the work of Matthew Bourne. Of course, there is no disputing its infectious exuberance…

We'll be talking about Royal Opera's Jenufa two decades from now

16 October 2021 9:00 am

Leos Janacek cared about words. He’d hang about central Brno, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and trying to capture…

Are we going to have to start taking Calixto Bieito seriously? ENO’s Carmen reviewed

15 February 2020 9:00 am

Calixto Bieito’s Carmen: three words to make an opera critic’s heart leap. Until quite recently, Bieito was the operatic provocateur…

Do Jews think differently?

5 October 2019 9:00 am

Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with…

More Grace Kelly than Grace Jones: Welsh National Opera’s Carmen reviewed

28 September 2019 9:00 am

How do you take your Carmen? Sun-drenched exotic fantasy with a side order of castanets, or cool and gritty, sour…

Gaelle Arquez as Carmen in Barrie Kosky's production at the Royal Opera. [Photo: ROH / Bill Cooper]

Kosky’s Carmen is still the smartest show in town – and the most fun

8 December 2018 9:00 am

It’s December, and while musical theatre is busy celebrating ‘warm woollen mittens’, opera, as usual, is far more interested in…

A step too far: the new production of Carmen at the Royal Opera House

A colossal bore: Royal Opera’s Carmen reviewed

17 February 2018 9:00 am

The new production of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera has received mixed reviews. It shouldn’t have done. They should…

Carlos Acosta’s incoherent Carmen is a disaster

7 November 2015 9:00 am

The love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price… The amount of unconditional love sloshing about at…

You can feel as if you’re in a colony of rabbits: Matthew Bourne’s Car Man reviewed

1 August 2015 9:00 am

Hot, languorous, sizzling… I was thinking what an ideal show Matthew Bourne’s noir comedy is to watch on a summer’s…

Stéphanie d’Oustrac (Carmen) and Pavel Cernoch (Don José) in ‘Carmen’ at Glyndebourne

Was Glyndebourne right to revive Donizetti’s Poliuto? No, says Michael Tanner

30 May 2015 9:00 am

It’s been a busy operatic week, with a nearly great concert performance of Parsifal in Birmingham on Sunday (reviewed by…

Wagner at the Proms

17 August 2013 9:00 am

It would be interesting to know why Tristan und Isolde was placed in the Proms programme in between Siegfried and…