Royal Opera
There will be blood
Lucia di Lammermoor is one of the two or three Donizetti operas that have never fallen out of the repertoire,…
Original sin
The Royal Opera has bitten the bullet so far as Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov goes, and opted to stage the original…
Straight talking
It’s widely agreed that the most difficult form of opera to bring off is operetta, whether of the Austro-German or…
Double trouble
It’s scene five of Kasper Holten’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Michael Fabiano’s Lensky is alone with a snow-covered…
Royal Opera’s Cavalleria rusticana isn’t nearly vulgar enough
How often do you get a chance to see two operas by Leoncavallo in the same city in the same…
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,…
Fossilised Figaro
Is there a more extraordinary, more heart-stilling moment in all opera than the finale of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro?…
All roads lead to Callas
Bellini belongs to that category of not-quite-great operatic composers whose works are also very difficult to perform adequately, and don’t…
Shaw hand
When is a rape not a rape? It’s an unsettling question — far more so than anything offered up by…
Show and Tell
There’s no such thing as a tasteful rape scene — or there certainly shouldn’t be. It’s an act of grossest…
Better than Bayreuth
Which of Wagner’s mature dramas is the most challenging, for performers and spectators? The one you’re seeing at the moment,…
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…
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,…
The price of pleasure
Brecht/Weill’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny was premièred in 1930, Auden/Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in 1951. Twenty-one…
Master class
ENO’s new production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is a triumph about which only the most niggling of reservations…
To hell and back
What a week to stage an opera about art’s power to challenge institutional authority, oppression — even death itself. Orfeo’s…
Where to start…
Whether by chance or bold design, the Royal Opera’s two Christmas shows were written at precisely the same moment, between…
Delusions of grandeur
Any adequate performance of Tristan und Isolde, and the first night of the Royal Opera’s production was at least that,…
From the sacred to the secular
Terrorism; East-West diplomacy; nuclear war: John Adams’s operas have poured music into the faultlines of 21st-century global politics, and the…
Don’t look now
Mozart’s first great opera, Idomeneo, is not often performed, and perhaps it’s better that way. It should be seen as…
Revival MOT
One of the greatest tests of how an opera house is functioning is the quality of its revivals. Both the…
Robo-Tell
Is there a fundamental, insuperable problem with staging Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a budget, without the resources to conjure up…
Douchebags and dartboards
So how did London’s two big opera companies launch their new seasons last week? Not perhaps in the way you…
Simple pleasures
According to some textbooks, one thing the fathers of Soviet choreography hastened to remove from ballet was that awkward-looking language…
