Opera
Kommilitonen! is Peter Maxwell Davies’s new opera, to a text by David Pountney, who also directs the première production at the Royal Academy of Music.
Kommilitonen! is Peter Maxwell Davies’s new opera, to a text by David Pountney, who also directs the première production at the Royal Academy of Music. It makes a stirring, invigorating evening, though at the end it isn’t clear which direction it is pointing in, while the whole mode of the work makes you feel that it must be pointing somewhere.
The title means ‘Fellow Students’, and there are three separate strands, which become interwoven towards the end. One is of the black American student James Meredith, who insisted on attending the University of Mississippi in 1962, and had to...
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English Touring Opera continues to be the most heroic of companies. This spring season it is performing at 17 locations, from Exeter to Perth, Belfast to Norwich. And in the many years that I have been going to its productions, there has been no compromise in standards and absolutely no contraction of repertoire to the familiar and the safe, if anything the reverse.
English Touring Opera continues to be the most heroic of companies. This spring season it is performing at 17 locations, from Exeter to Perth, Belfast to Norwich. And in the many years that I have been going to its productions, there has been no compromise in standards and absolutely no contraction of repertoire to the familiar and the safe, if anything the reverse.
Last autumn it premièred Goehr’s tough Promised End, an immense artistic achievement. And now they are putting on Tobias Picker’s Fantastic Mr Fox, an operatic adaptation of Roald Dahl, with young children from each of the...
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Scene: the Royal Opera House, last Friday, 10.35 p.m. In the last act of Aida, Amneris, in the formidable person of Olga Borodina, has just concluded her magnificent denunciation of priests: ‘Cruel monsters! You will always be thirsty for blood!’ and the final ten minutes remain, the exquisite scene in which the hero and heroine suffocate while singing their farewell to life.
Scene: the Royal Opera House, last Friday, 10.35 p.m. In the last act of Aida, Amneris, in the formidable person of Olga Borodina, has just concluded her magnificent denunciation of priests: ‘Cruel monsters! You will always be thirsty for blood!’ and the final ten minutes remain, the exquisite scene in which the hero and heroine suffocate while singing their farewell to life.
Sitting in the stalls, I know just how Amneris feels, and my silent imprecations are directed to the Powers That Be who decree that operas should end close to 11 p.m. I realise this isn’t the first...
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Two of the most popular operas in the repertoire, works which I adore, but which I’m almost always disappointed by productions of; yet on two consecutive evenings in the Wales Millennium Centre I gained intense pleasure from each of them.
Two of the most popular operas in the repertoire, works which I adore, but which I’m almost always disappointed by productions of; yet on two consecutive evenings in the Wales Millennium Centre I gained intense pleasure from each of them. What went right?
Both Il Trovatore and Die Fledermaus are works of overflowing tunefulness, with almost inscrutable plots. The first duty of the producer — once it was considered to be his only duty — is to ensure that the audience is fully involved in the action, which it can only be if it’s clear what the action is; and...
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It is some time since any of the masterpieces of Wagner’s high maturity has been staged in London, so ENO’s revival of Parsifal was most welcome, despite memories of the irritations and worse of the production in 1999.
It is some time since any of the masterpieces of Wagner’s high maturity has been staged in London, so ENO’s revival of Parsifal was most welcome, despite memories of the irritations and worse of the production in 1999. Since then it has toured the world, and achieved contemporary immortality on DVD, a performance recorded in Baden-Baden. The ENO revival is directed by Daniel Dooner, and is quite extensively revised, though not nearly extensively enough for my taste.
But before I deal with it, I want to hymn the praises of the musical side, which is in most respects quite...
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The Royal Opera has been both noisy and evasive about Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera, Anna Nicole, with words by Richard Thomas of Jerry Springer: the Opera notoriety.
The Royal Opera has been both noisy and evasive about Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera, Anna Nicole, with words by Richard Thomas of Jerry Springer: the Opera notoriety. I have never seen and heard so much advance publicity, for any arts event whatever, and yet, apart from telling us that it was to be about the eponymous celebrity, there was very little about the piece that could actually be called information.
There seemed something reflexive about the whole operation, endless articles and interviews, but a void at the centre, which is exactly and obviously what celebrity culture is. The impression...
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