Opera
Vocally and theatrically strong: Il trittico at the Royal Opera reviewed
The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of…
ENO must go
Last week Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, revealed that opera receives just under a fifth of the…
Long live ENO!
The three most moving, transporting death scenes in 19th-century opera all involve the respective heroines mounting a funeral pyre —…
Cruel and absurd: WNO’s Barber of Seville reviewed
‘Forget Downton Abbey!’ exhorts David Pountney in the programme for Figaro Forever, Welsh National Opera’s season of Beaumarchais operas, The…
Life-enhancing achievement: ENO's Magic Flute reviewed
Centre stage, there’s an industrial-looking black platform, secured by cables. The Three Ladies snap the unconscious Tamino on a mobile…
Unlikely to win converts: Royal Opera's L'Étoile reviewed
It’s widely agreed that the most difficult form of opera to bring off is operetta, whether of the Austro-German or…
Miserable libretto, music to match: Andrea Chénier reviewed
Opera North continues to be the most reliable, inspiring, resourceful and enterprising opera company in the United Kingdom, and all…
Powerful and upsetting: Pelléas et Mélisande at the Barbican reviewed
There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and…
Conductor and orchestra played as if in love: Royal Opera’s Eugene Onegin reviewed
It’s scene five of Kasper Holten’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Michael Fabiano’s Lensky is alone with a snow-covered…
Royal Opera’s Cavalleria rusticana isn’t nearly vulgar enough
How often do you get a chance to see two operas by Leoncavallo in the same city in the same…
A devastating Jenufa - if you could hear it
About 15 minutes into act one of Jenufa, the student in the next seat leaned over to her companions and…
Has there ever been a better time to be a lover of Baroque opera?
Time was when early music was a 6 p.m. concert, Baroque began with Bach and ended with Corelli’s Christmas Concerto,…
Morgen und Abend: the kind of opera that gives opera a bad name
The Royal Opera House seemed nervous about Georg Friedrich Haas’s world première Morgen und Abend. They sent out a pdf…
That Force of Destiny isn’t a great evening is the fault of Verdi not ENO
The Force of Destiny, ENO’s latest offering to its ‘stakeholders’, as its audiences are now called thanks to Cressida Pollock,…
Northern Ireland Opera’s Turandot will fill you with awe and revulsion
Chords as bright and sweet as pomegranate seeds burst and spill in Turandot, a splinter of bitterness at their centre.…
Glyndebourne caters to the lower-middle classes not past-it toffs
What is Glyndebourne? A middle-aged Bullingdon. That’s a common view: a luxury bun fight for past-it toffs who glug champagne,…
I doubt Goethe intended Werther's sorrows to be as unremitting as this
There are some things the French do better than everyone else. Cheese, military defeats and extra-marital affairs are a given,…
Please let's have more musicals like this Kiss Me, Kate at Opera North
Opera North’s new production of Cole Porter’s masterwork Kiss Me, Kate has been so widely and justly praised that I…
Thank god for bored wives: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the ENO reviewed
‘Kiss me, Sergei! Kiss me hard! Kiss me until the icons fall and split!’ sings Katerina Ismailova, adulterous antiheroine of…
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s films verge on the incomprehensible — but that doesn’t stop him being a genius
London’s Goethe-Institut has a two-month season of films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose 70th anniversary it’s celebrating), but only five…
As good a treatment of a Bellini opera as we are likely to see: WNO's I puritani reviewed
Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t…
The Magic Flute has never made more cartoonish sense - an Edinburgh Festival roundup
London may cry foul over Hamlet’s misplaced to-be-ing and not-to-be-ing but Edinburgh is in raptures over a Magic Flute which…
As with so many Strauss operas, Daphne's one redeeming feature is its end
Richard Strauss’s Daphne is one of the operas he wrote during the excruciatingly long Indian summer of his composing life,…
Glyndebourne’s Ravel double bill comes close to perfection
When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought…
Why the City might yet miss stroppy regulator Martin Wheatley
A City insider at last month’s Mansion House dinner told me the Financial Conduct Authority had become ‘a bit of…
