Opera
‘Where I grew up, classical music was diversity’
Richard Bratby talks to Birmingham Opera Company’s new music director Alpesh Chauhan about his Brummie roots, Bruckner and how his BAME heritage is a non-story
Magnificent muddle
In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti…
It’ll end in tears
It was the fourth time, or maybe the fifth, that I found myself reaching for the tissues that I began…
Enclosure acts
‘I don’t want to do my work. I want to go for a walk. I want to eat all the…
Swanky, stale and sullen
The summer music festival has had its day, says Norman Lebrecht
Surfer’s paradise
The full addictive potential of classical YouTube needs to be experienced to be understood. And let’s be honest, there are…
Versailles lockdown
A few years ago I interviewed an eminent baroque conductor. Prickly and professorial, tired after a day of rehearsals, he…
The Met goes Eurovision
Desperate times call for desperate measures. With the world’s opera houses currently dark, the New York Metropolitan Opera tackled the…
Forget me not
No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time…
Raiding the sonic store cupboard
There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis,…
Bigamists, lunatics and adventurers
The world of 19th-century British music was raucous, but are there any masterpieces waiting to be rediscovered? wonders Richard Bratby
Letters
We need career detectives Sir: Your lead article (Trial and error, 29 February) rightly condemns Tom Watson for pressurising police…
The alienation effect
‘People may say I can’t sing,’ said the soprano Florence Foster Jenkins, ‘but no one can ever say I didn’t…
‘Opera is something you come to later’
After a record 18 years – and counting – as music director, Antonio Pappano talks to Norman Lebrecht about life after Covent Garden and how opera is beyond younger audiences
Eurotrash Verdi
Verdi’s Luisa Miller is set in the Tyrol in the early 17th century, and for some opera directors that’s a…
Fellatio-free
Calixto Bieito’s Carmen: three words to make an opera critic’s heart leap. Until quite recently, Bieito was the operatic provocateur…
Follow the lieder
‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show……
Sadistic and repellent and thrilling: Mascagni’s Iris reviewed
If you’ve ever felt that poor Madama Butterfly had a bit of a raw deal, then you really, really don’t…
Handsome and revivable but I wasn’t moved: Royal Opera’s Death in Venice reviewed
Premièred within two years of each other, Luchino Visconti’s film and Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice both take Thomas…
Meet the unrivalled Sun King of early music, William Christie
It’s morning in the garden of William Christie, and he’s talking about home improvements. ‘I planted three pines up there…
Ravishing and poignant: ENO’s Orphée reviewed
Billy Wilder, asked for his opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of his movie Sunset Boulevard, famously replied: ‘Those…
Why are Haydn’s operas so lousy? La fedelta premiata reviewed
There’s a book about musicals that every opera lover should read. Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum is a history…
![English National Opera's triumphant new production of Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus, directed by Daniel Kramer. [Photo: Alistair Muir]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Opera_Exhibitions.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
A triumph: ENO’s Mask of Orpheus reviewed
ENO’s Mask of Orpheus is a triumph. It’s also unintelligible. Even David Pountney, who produced the original ENO staging in…
More misogynistic than the original: ENO’s Orpheus in the Underworld reviewed
It’s Act Three of Emma Rice’s new production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, and Eurydice (Mary Bevan) is trapped…
Why are so many operas by women adaptations of films by men?
Opera’s line of corpses — bloodied, battered, dumped in a bag — is a long one. Now it can add…
