Opera
Bird brained
Blame it on Serge Diaghilev. Rimsky-Korsakov died in 1908 and never saw the première of his last opera, The Golden…
Great Britten
No question, the Royal Opera is on a roll. Just look at the cast list alone for Deborah Warner’s new…
Away with the fairies
Scottish Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to open in midwinter. Snow falls, fairies hurl snowballs…
Me time
I think it was when she leaned forward and balanced on one leg that Barbara Hannigan jumped the shark. It…
Refugees from Moominland
Spoiler alert. The last words in Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen come from a child playing a frog. The story…
Star power and spectacle
London felt like its old self on Friday night. Possibly it was just me; when you visit the capital once…
Pot-washers and pole-dancers
The Royal Opera has come over all baroque. In the Linbury Theatre, they’re hosting Irish National Opera’s production of Vivaldi’s…
There will be blood
Say what you like about that Duke of Mantua, but he’s basically an OK sort of bloke. A bit of…
Chorus of approval
Nabucco, said Giuseppe Verdi, ‘was born under a lucky star’. It was both his last throw of the dice and…
Booster shots of sunlight
Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra began the year with a world première. Unsuk Chin’s Second Violin Concerto…
Sublime – and ridiculous
It’s the final scene of The Valkyrie and Wotan is wearing cords. They’re a sensible choice for a hard-working deity:…
Whistling the scenery
With Glyndebourne’s The Rake’s Progress, the show starts with David Hockney’s front cloth. The colour, the ingenuity, the visual bravura:…
Showtime
Until 1881, HMS Pinafore was the second-longest-running show in West End history. Within a year of its première it had…
Satisfaction guaranteed
‘Drammatico’, wrote César Franck over the opening of his Piano Quintet, and you’d better believe he meant it. The score…
Stepmother superior
Leos Janacek cared about words. He’d hang about central Brno, notebook in hand, eavesdropping on conversations and trying to capture…
Such sweet sorrow
‘It’s generally agreed that in contemporary practice, this opera proposes significant ethical and cultural problems,’ says the director Lindy Hume…
Teenage kicks
For a one-hit composer, we hear rather a lot of Pietro Mascagni. His reputation rests on his 1890 debut Cavalleria…
Grateful for large mercies
Glyndebourne is nothing if not honest. ‘In response to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions our 2021 performances of Tristan und Isolde…
Springtime for Putin
Alexander Litvinenko lies in a London hospital, dying of polonium poisoning. That photograph from 2006 haunts the memory: the medical…
Money, money – and music
Art is supposed to emerge from poverty but extreme wealth does not preclude talent, as the history of composers proves. By Richard Bratby
Too bawdy for the Beeb
Malcolm Arnold composed his opera The Dancing Master in 1952 for BBC television. It never appeared, the problem being the…
Carry on Bel Canto
Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste,…
Bring me sunshine
Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency —…
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…
Tsar quality
There are worse inconveniences than having to wear a face mask to the opera. But there’s one consequence that hadn’t…
