Royal opera house
ENO must go
Last week Darren Henley, chief executive of Arts Council England, revealed that opera receives just under a fifth of the…
Is Twitter now in charge of the Royal Ballet’s artistic programming?
For all the billing and cooing on public forums about the Royal Ballet’s The Two Pigeons revival, there’s a silent…
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…
Carlos Acosta’s incoherent Carmen is a disaster
The love that asks no questions, the love that pays the price… The amount of unconditional love sloshing about at…
This Juliet needs a new Romeo
You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first…
The best ballerinas in Britain at the moment are hairy and male
There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The…
Sylvie Guillem’s better than ever in her final, final Coliseum farewell
The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell…
The band that nearly saved the Cuban revolution
By chance, my first night in Havana in 1987 was the night the clubs went dark to mark the death…
‘Bewitching’: Krol Roger at the Royal Opera reviewed
‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed…
Il turco in Italia, Royal Opera House, reviewed: bring sunglasses
Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal…
La Fille mal gardee at the Royal Opera House reviewed: light, lithe and tender
The current talking-point at the Royal Ballet is the Russians milling around. One can sound unfortunately as if one’s starting…
Tippett’s triumphant failure: Birmingham Opera Company’s The Ice Break reviewed
The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since,…
Royal Opera’s Tristan und Isolde: an absurd production - but still a magnificent night
Any adequate performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the first night of the Royal Opera’s production was at least that,…
Glyndebourne’s Turn of the Screw: horrors of the most innocent and creepy kind
We all know that ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, but nowhere is this more reliably (and violently)…
Ballet’s super couple should stick to the classical repertoire
Last week, the feast of long-awaited dance events on offer echoed bygone days when London life was dominated by the…
Royal Opera's Maria Stuarda: pathos and nobility from Joyce DiDonato, lazy nonsense from the directors
London is lucky to have heard Joyce DiDonato at the height of her powers in two consecutive seasons. The American…
Dialogues des Carmélites brings out the best in Poulenc – and the Royal Opera House
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an audacious work, much more so than many others that advertise their audacity. It deals…
Jonathan Dimbleby’s notebook: In defence of Chris Patten
I usually spend most of the week at home in South Devon in front of my computer. But for the…
Romeo, Juliet and Mussolini
George Balanchine’s Serenade, the manifesto of 20th-century neoclassical choreography, requires a deep understanding of both its complex stylistic nuances and…
Two Mimi-Rodolfos at Opera North who go from nought to frisky very believably
Purists might have winced at Opera North’s advertisement for its latest revival of La Bohème. ‘If you see one musical…
Modern dance vs Shakespeare
In a dance world that has chosen to dispense with stylistic and semantic subtleties, ‘narrative ballet’ and ‘story ballet’ are…
The snobbery and sweaty brows of watching opera in the cinema
I remain puzzled that, so far as I know, no daily or weekly paper carries reviews of the New York…
The Royal Opera House's Die Frau ohne Schatten – a dream solution to Strauss’s problem opera?
If ever an opera was weighed down by its creators’ joint ambition, it is Die Frau ohne Schatten. Richard Strauss…
Bach is made for dancing
It appears that J.S. Bach’s music is to theatre-dance what whipped cream is to chocolate. Masterworks such as Trisha Brown’s…
