Opera
With its new production of Janácek’s last and in some ways most intractable opera, From the House of the Dead, Opera North shows once more that it is the most intelligently adventurous company in the UK, using its money where it is most needed: not on elaborate and perverse staging, but on high-class soloists and a small but excellent chorus, and an orchestra that can rival any in the country.
With its new production of Janácek’s last and in some ways most intractable opera, From the House of the Dead, Opera North shows once more that it is the most intelligently adventurous company in the UK, using its money where it is most needed: not on elaborate and perverse staging, but on high-class soloists and a small but excellent chorus, and an orchestra that can rival any in the country.
The rise in standards since Richard Farnes took over as music director has been astonishing. As soon as the harsh, weirdly scored introduction to House began, it was clear...
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After its brief detour into magnificence with The Return of Ulysses at the Young Vic, ENO has returned to its hell-bent form with, appropriately enough, a dramatisation of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust.
After its brief detour into magnificence with The Return of Ulysses at the Young Vic, ENO has returned to its hell-bent form with, appropriately enough, a dramatisation of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust. Not that the composer would recognise his work, first performed in 1846, from the production, described in the programme thus: ‘The extraordinary creative journey of Terry Gilliam reaches the operatic stage for the first time’, while the Synopsis begins, ‘Our production follows the trajectory of German art and history from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century’.
I thought that was Wagner’s province — and just in...
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Fidelio, once regarded as an uncomplicated celebration of what its title suggests, and of freedom, especially political freedom, has become a problem work, and most productions of it amount to uninterestingly complicated attempts to circumvent issues which shouldn’t have been present in the director’s mind in the first place.
Fidelio, once regarded as an uncomplicated celebration of what its title suggests, and of freedom, especially political freedom, has become a problem work, and most productions of it amount to uninterestingly complicated attempts to circumvent issues which shouldn’t have been present in the director’s mind in the first place. This has been a bad season, until Opera North broke the spell by mounting Tim Albery’s production, first seen in Scotland in 1994.
Last September, Welsh National Opera put on a production which was in every respect a simple disaster. Last month the Royal Opera managed a more elaborate but...
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The Tsar’s Bride is Rimsky-Korsakov’s tenth opera, give or take various versions of some previous ones, but you’d never guess it.
The Tsar’s Bride is Rimsky-Korsakov’s tenth opera, give or take various versions of some previous ones, but you’d never guess it. The production at the Royal Opera, which is exemplary in most respects, suggests a fairly talented newcomer to the genre, who isn’t yet in a position to boss his librettist around in the necessary ways.
The Overture sets no scene, and is anyway tiresome and undistinguished; there are lots of stereotypical choral scenes; the central set of characters and their motivations sometimes get submerged in superfluous sidelines. But, worse, the music meanders in strange ways, much of it...
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One of the troubles with opera is that since creating and putting one on involves so many people many composers write as if for eternity, or at least for a sizeable segment of it.
One of the troubles with opera is that since creating and putting one on involves so many people many composers write as if for eternity, or at least for a sizeable segment of it. It’s been a great boon in recent years that some companies, notably Tête-à-Tête, have encouraged the creation and production of operas-in-progress and of short pieces which enable composers and librettists, and the mainly young performers they recruit, to find out what they might be good at. It’s a great boost for the spirits of the opera-goer to realise that, if he is being bored rigid by...
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The opening performance of the Royal Opera’s first revival of Fidelio, in the production by Jürgen Flimm which was unwisely imported in 2007, was so dreary that it would be better not to comment on it, except that it seems worth separating the inherently feeble elements from the ones that happened to be present, and which may well have disappeared in later performances.
The opening performance of the Royal Opera’s first revival of Fidelio, in the production by Jürgen Flimm which was unwisely imported in 2007, was so dreary that it would be better not to comment on it, except that it seems worth separating the inherently feeble elements from the ones that happened to be present, and which may well have disappeared in later performances.
Kirill Petrenko was scheduled to conduct, and on the evidence of his past visits to the Royal Opera the result would have been impressive. A recurring back problem forced him to withdraw very late in rehearsals,...
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