Royal opera house
Wherefore art thou Romeo?
You always remember your first time, don’t you? And in ballet one imagines that Juliet wants to remember her first…
Gutted!
There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The…
Afterthoughts
The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell…
Cuban comet
By chance, my first night in Havana in 1987 was the night the clubs went dark to mark the death…
Ways of hearing
‘What gives your lies such power?’ asks the bewildered Sicilian leader in Szymanowski’s opera Krol Roger. The question is addressed…
Off colour
Big slats of orange, burning yellows, an Adriatic in electric blue: I wish I’d bought my sunglasses to the Royal…
Lethal weapon
The current talking-point at the Royal Ballet is the Russians milling around. One can sound unfortunately as if one’s starting…
Beauty and the bleak
The Ice Break is Michael Tippett’s fourth opera, first produced at Covent Garden in 1977 and rarely produced anywhere since,…
Delusions of grandeur
Any adequate performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the first night of the Royal Opera’s production was at least that,…
Screwed up
We all know that ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, but nowhere is this more reliably (and violently)…
Great expectations
Last week, the feast of long-awaited dance events on offer echoed bygone days when London life was dominated by the…
Close encounters
London is lucky to have heard Joyce DiDonato at the height of her powers in two consecutive seasons. The American…
Dark night of the soul
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an audacious work, much more so than many others that advertise their audacity. It deals…
A broadcaster’s notebook
I usually spend most of the week at home in South Devon in front of my computer. But for the…
Balanchinian ideal
George Balanchine’s Serenade, the manifesto of 20th-century neoclassical choreography, requires a deep understanding of both its complex stylistic nuances and…
Northern light
Purists might have winced at Opera North’s advertisement for its latest revival of La Bohème. ‘If you see one musical…
Study in spectacle
In a dance world that has chosen to dispense with stylistic and semantic subtleties, ‘narrative ballet’ and ‘story ballet’ are…
Character differences
I remain puzzled that, so far as I know, no daily or weekly paper carries reviews of the New York…
Dream team
If ever an opera was weighed down by its creators’ joint ambition, it is Die Frau ohne Schatten. Richard Strauss…
Inspired by Bach
It appears that J.S. Bach’s music is to theatre-dance what whipped cream is to chocolate. Masterworks such as Trisha Brown’s…
What’s it all about?
Every time there’s a new production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni I have to ask the same question: why is this…
The genius of Gluck
This is the first of my more-or-less monthly columns, the idea of which is to report on operatic events other…
The year in opera
I’ve been hoping that in this, the last of my weekly columns on opera, I would be able to strike…
Underpowered Wagner
Debussy’s description of the music of Parsifal as being ‘lit up from behind’ is famous; less so is Wagner’s own…
Seasonal treats
There was a time when the term ‘world première’ was not as fashionable as it is these days. Great works…
