Opera
Love at first sight
Now the kids are back for the school holidays, I have a licence to watch complete trash again. No more…
Original sin
The Royal Opera has bitten the bullet so far as Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov goes, and opted to stage the original…
Round-up of new opera
A mixed year so far for new opera. A few really dismal things have appeared from people who should know…
Excess baggage
Near the end of Elena Langer’s new opera Figaro Gets a Divorce, as the Almaviva household — now emigrés in…
What’s love got to do with it?
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 —…
Not a pretty sight
‘Forget Downton Abbey!’ exhorts David Pountney in the programme for Figaro Forever, Welsh National Opera’s season of Beaumarchais operas, The…
Mozart magic
Centre stage, there’s an industrial-looking black platform, secured by cables. The Three Ladies snap the unconscious Tamino on a mobile…
Straight talking
It’s widely agreed that the most difficult form of opera to bring off is operetta, whether of the Austro-German or…
Northern lights
Opera North continues to be the most reliable, inspiring, resourceful and enterprising opera company in the United Kingdom, and all…
In two minds
There are some operas, as there are some people, that it is impossible to establish a settled relationship with, and…
Double trouble
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…
Lost in translation
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,…
All at sea
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…
Lady killer
‘Kiss me, Sergei! Kiss me hard! Kiss me until the icons fall and split!’ sings Katerina Ismailova, adulterous antiheroine of…
Incomprehensible 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…
All roads lead to Callas
Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t…
