Garsington Opera
Thrilling: Garsington’s Queen of Spades reviewed
Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is one of those operas that under-promises on paper but over-delivers on stage. It’s hard…
Sparky and often hilarious: Garsington’s Un giorno di regno reviewed
Hang out with both trainspotters and opera buffs and you’ll soon notice that opera buffs are by far the more…
All’s well that ends well
Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set…
Fire and fizz
Are you supposed to laugh at the end of Don Giovanni? Audiences often do, and they did at the end…
More melancholy, please
The Yeomen of the Guard has been called the ‘English Meistersinger’ but the more you think about that, the dafter…
Carry on Bel Canto
Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste,…
Spelling disaster
When you think of Handel’s Amadigi (in so far as anyone thinks about the composer’s rarely staged, also-ran London score…
Coming up roses
At the turning point of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier, all the clocks stop. Octavian has arrived…
One for the road
The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time…
Swanky, stale and sullen
The summer music festival has had its day, says Norman Lebrecht
Deft, elegant and genuinely chilling: Garsington’s Turn of the Screw reviewed
Think of the children in opera. Not knowing sopranos and mezzos, pigtailed and pinafored or tightly trousered-up to look child-like,…
Can an Offenbach production be too silly? Garsington’s Fantasio reviewed
The tears of a clown have often fallen on fertile operatic ground. Think of Rigoletto and I Pagliacci; or The…
Garsington makes as good a case as you can for Strauss’s frothy Capriccio
‘Is there an end [to this opera] that is not trivial?’ asks the Countess in her final bars of Richard…
Cold and confusing: Garsington’s Die Zauberflöte reviewed
The picnic hamper’s open, the bubbly is chilled, and country house opera is starting to eat itself. When you arrive…
Salieri’s revenge
Magical transformations are a commonplace of opera. We see our heroes turned into animals, trees, statues; witness wild beasts turned…
The Spectator’s notes
Even if everything goes wronger still, the Greek No vote is a great victory for the left. Until now, the…
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…
