Richard Jones
Highs and lows
Rejoice: live music is back. Or at least, live music with a live audience, which, as Sir Simon Rattle admitted,…
Follow the lieder
‘Popular’ classical music is a relative term. Show me someone who thinks Beethoven is surefire box office, and I’ll show……
If opera survives, it’ll be thanks to artists and curators, not opera houses
It was bucketing it down in Venice, yet the beach was heaving. Families, lovebirds, warring kids, a yappy mutt, all…
One of the greatest operatic experiences of my life: Royal Opera’s Katya Kabanova reviewed
Janacek’s upsetting opera Katya Kabanova, which hasn’t been seen in the UK for some time, turned up in two different…
Glyndebourne’s Der Rosenkavalier never forgets to be funny
‘Comedy for music by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Music by Richard Strauss.’ That’s what the creators of Der Rosenkavalier wrote on…
A delicious operatic ragout of horror: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk reviewed
There is famously no door into the late-night diner of Edward Hopper’s ‘Nighthawks’. Its three silent patrons are trapped behind…
The latest astonishing achievement from the creators of War Horse
The Twilight Zone, an American TV show from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost story for the age of space…
Excellent but there’s too much larking about: ENO’s Rodelinda reviewed
ENO has revived Richard Jones’s production of Handel’s Rodelinda. It was warmly greeted on its first outing in 2014, though…
DIY Bohème
The Royal Opera’s one production that, it has always confidently been claimed, need never be replaced has been replaced. John…
Original sin
The Royal Opera has bitten the bullet so far as Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov goes, and opted to stage the original…
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…
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,…
Master class
ENO’s new production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is a triumph about which only the most niggling of reservations…
Golden hearted
Puccini’s La fanciulla del West is, one suspects, one of those works that modern audiences struggle to keep a straight…
Musical feasts
I wasn’t going to write about Handel’s Rodelinda, wasn’t even intending to go, but thanks to the kindness of the…
