Eno
Long life
It’s June, and the country-house summer opera festivals are now in full swing. Glyndebourne, which opened the season last month,…
Carmen v. Carmen
It’s been a busy operatic week, with a nearly great concert performance of Parsifal in Birmingham on Sunday (reviewed by…
Polite pillage
Forget the pollsters and political pundits — English National Opera called it first and called it Right when it programmed…
Falling down
This week, some 200 years since Goya’s ‘The Disasters of War’, almost 80 years after Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, and over 50…
Blunt and bloody
A wicked deception is sprung in the opening moments of this New York-originated concert staging of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh…
Diary
Last week I went to the exhilarating English National Opera production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers — five hours of wonderful…
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…
Long life
I went last week to see the justly praised production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers at English National Opera, and I…
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…
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…
Sexy ladies
This season of live Met relays got off to a most impressive start, with an electrifying account of Verdi’s tenth…
Golden hearted
Puccini’s La fanciulla del West is, one suspects, one of those works that modern audiences struggle to keep a straight…
Revival MOT
One of the greatest tests of how an opera house is functioning is the quality of its revivals. Both the…
Douchebags and dartboards
So how did London’s two big opera companies launch their new seasons last week? Not perhaps in the way you…
That’s entertainment
Operas about artists are not rare. However — perhaps for obvious reasons — those artists tend to be musicians, singers,…
Loss of heart
In all its minute details, Der Rosenkavalier is rooted in a painstakingly stylised version of Rococo Vienna that, paradoxically, is…
Oedipus wrecks
I had high hopes for Julian Anderson’s first opera, Thebans. Premièred at the Coliseum last Saturday, it promised to mark…
Going places
It’s been a spring tradition for several years now for English National Opera to present small-scale productions in various venues…
Musical feasts
I wasn’t going to write about Handel’s Rodelinda, wasn’t even intending to go, but thanks to the kindness of the…
The year in opera
I’ve been hoping that in this, the last of my weekly columns on opera, I would be able to strike…
Flawed Flute
A new production of The Magic Flute is something to look forward to, if with apprehension. How many aspects of…
Divine comedy
Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (but if it’s given in English, why not The Bat? Does that somehow sound too unglamorous?)…
Sensational Strauss
It’s been a sensational week for opera in London, with a sensationally good performance of Strauss’s Elektra at the Royal…
