Opera
Marriage minefield
There are two places in Le Nozze di Figaro where the music undergoes a brief but potent change, which indicates…
Troy story
In the late 1970s the Royal Opera announced that it would be performing Berlioz’s Les Troyens and Wagner’s Ring in…
Best of Britten
This week’s opera-going afforded one example of truly great art, and one of its plausible counterfeit. To deal with the…
Royal treatment
Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety…
Disturbing relationships
It struck me for the first time at the latest revival of David McVicar’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salome that…
Star quality
English Touring Opera ended its spring tour in Cambridge this year with three performances of The Barber of Seville and…
Learning to love Falstaff
It’s taken me a shockingly long time to realise how great Verdi’s Falstaff is, and I still wouldn’t agree that…
All at sea
Pharmaceutical considerations were uppermost in my mind as I made my way to the Barbican Hall for Philip Glass’s Einstein…
Elemental force
The new production of Wagner’s first indisputable masterpiece The Flying Dutchman by English National Opera is a decided success, the…
Return to mystery
Weber’s Der Freischütz is the finest neglected opera in or hovering on the edge of the canon. It’s not entirely…
Role reversal
Considering how close, if mysterious, the links are between being gay and loving opera, it could seem surprising that there…
Thrills and chills
Lightning struck, after what must surely be one of the most dreary seasons at the Royal Opera, with a revival…
Standing room only
Of all the operatic ventures that have sprung up in England in the past 20 years, Birmingham Opera Company may…
Straying from the brief
‘Praising! That’s it!’ Rilke exclaims in one of his ecstatic Sonnets to Orpheus. It seems to be an unconditional injunction,…
Fatal flaw
Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, whose UK première was at the Royal Opera last week, has received the severest critical panning…
The unkindest cut
Tristan und Isolde is a perfect opera, but where are the perfect performers and, just as important, the perfect listeners…
Sturdy specimen
A few weeks ago I was speculating anxiously on the possibility that even the greatest masterpieces, in opera or other…
Offenbach hotchpotch
Is any opera more frustrating than Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann? It persistently arouses hopes which it almost as persistently…
Great expectations
Bellini’s Norma is an opera that I not only adore: it obsesses me, too. Whenever I listen to it, I…
Man about the House
Michael Henderson talks to Sir Thomas Allen, who is celebrating 40 years at Covent Garden
Devoid of ideas
When you see two of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire in one week in one of the world’s leading…
Mixed messages
The Enchanted Island is a baroque concoction at the New York Met which has been widely touted and last Saturday…
Look at life
Giulio Cesare was the first of Handel’s operas to return to general favour after more than a century and a…
The opera of all operas
As I’m not the first person to have pointed out, the Royal Opera has indulged in a truly phenomenal number…
Special relationships
‘It is impossible that you should not have sensed,’ wrote Wagner to Ludwig II shortly before the first performance of…
