Opera
The amazing new Grange Park Opera has produced a largely successful Die Walküre
The new Grange Park Opera at Horsley is amazing, as everyone who visits it must agree. In less than a…
Social comedy at its most lovingly, evocatively drawn: Albert Herring at Buxton Festival reviewed
Someone at the Buxton International Festival had a wry smile on their face when programming this year’s trio of operas.…
A work as intrinsically uninteresting as this Mozart opera maybe needs trendy costumes
Mitridate, re di Ponto was Mozart’s fifth opera, written and first produced when he was 14 years old. Absolutely amazing.…
That this Fidelio is merely frustrating counts as something of a success
If you want to see an opera director kicking a genius when they’re down — and I mean really sticking…
One of the most exalting operatic experience I have had: Longborough’s Tristan reviewed
In an essay called ‘Wagner’s fluids’, Susan Sontag concludes, ‘The depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable…
Shattering climaxes and showstopping singing: Glyndebourne’s Hamlet reviewed
Brett Dean’s new opera for Glyndebourne is a big-hearted romantic comedy, sunny and life-affirming. Only joking — this is contemporary…
First-rate musical performance & production: Garsington’s Semele reviewed
Handel’s Semele, one of the most enjoyable operas (or opera-oratorio, if you insist) in the repertoire, is, in its upshot,…
L’Orfeo is at its darkest and most painful outside the opera house: Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s concert staging reviewed
The ancient Greeks had a word for it —katabasis, descending into the depths, to the underworld itself, in search of…
Insufferable rubbish: Glyndebourne’s Hipermestra reviewed
Anyone who thinks they have experienced absolute boredom, or even doubts that such a state can exist, should go to…
Much of Scottish Opera’s Bohème is spot-on – but it begins with an act of petty vandalism
When a composer begins an opera, they create a world. You don’t need a full-scale overture: the tear-stained violins that…
Gilbert & Sullivan’s characters never exist below the waist: ETO’s Patience reviewed
English Touring Opera is playing safe this spring, with Tosca and Patience, and was rewarded, in Cambridge at least, with…
Puccini at his most enjoyably reprehensible: Opera North’s Turandot reviewed
Some opera-lovers prefer concert performances to full stagings. I don’t. It’s that whole Gesamtkunstwerk thing: opera needs to be seen…
The cast’s talents are not put to good use: Thomas Adès’s Exterminating Angel reviewed
The Adèsives were out in force at Covent Garden last Monday for the UK première of their hero’s third opera,…
A marvellous occasion – but could it not have been pruned? Il ritorno d’Ulisse reviewed
Monteverdi 450 — the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists’ tour of his three operas to 33 cities across two…
A ravishing Rameau premiere – pity the choreography was pure Bez
The English weren’t the first cowpat composers. Jean-Philippe Rameau raised the art of frolicking in the fields to such heights…
Sung with such eloquence it makes you wish we heard more operas in Hungarian
As we waited for curtain-up on Scottish Opera’s new production of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle a member of staff walked out…
Unbearable (in a good way): Opera Holland Park's La voix humaine reviewed
Opera is littered with the bodies of abandoned women. Step over Dido and Gilda, and you’ll still stumble into Donna…
Denial has rarely looked so good: ENO’s Partenope reviewed
Ceci n’est pas une Partenope. Forget the warring classical kingdoms of Naples and Cumae: this is surrealist Paris in the…
Nothing could prepare me for so deep an abyss of idiocy: Royal Opera’s Die Meistersinger reviewed
I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal…
Quietly devastating: Scottish Opera’s Pelléas and Mélisande reviewed
‘Perhaps in this world nothing ever happens without purpose,’ sings old, blind King Arkel in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and…
Only Mozart could have done this play justice: The Winter’s Tale at the ENO reviewed
Why set a supremely great play to music? The Winter’s Tale, the play of Shakespeare’s that I love most, has…
Frank Martin was mad to write an opera based on Tristan – but the results are worthwhile
Frank Martin is one of those composers whose work seems to survive only by virtue of constantly renewed neglect. His…
The opera conductor who’s marginally less popular than Donald Trump
The story so far: in 1986 English National Opera hired Jonathan Miller to direct Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The…
Ravishing music, but read the plot first: Opera North’s Hansel and Gretel reviewed
Fully to enjoy Opera North’s new production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel you need to take a trinocular perspective on…
The thrills are in the visuals: Philip Glass’s Les Enfants Terribles reviewed
Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re…
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