As we waited for curtain-up on Scottish Opera’s new production of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle a member of staff walked out on stage. Don’t worry, he reassured us, he wasn’t about to announce that a member of the cast was indisposed. Nervous laughter from the auditorium. Still in the same matter-of-fact tone, he carried on, and
Opera is littered with the bodies of abandoned women. Step over Dido and Gilda, and you’ll still stumble into Donna Elvira, Euridice, Elisabeth, Ariadne, Alcina. The list goes on. Pop music might have ‘50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’, but opera has 500. Call it chauvinism or voyeurism if you like, but opera’s women are
Ceci n’est pas une Partenope. Forget the warring classical kingdoms of Naples and Cumae: this is surrealist Paris in the 1930s and imminent invasion is the stuff of conversational parenthesis, barely worth interrupting a rubber of bridge for, let alone an embrace. Man Ray, Lee Miller and their androgynous associates slink and affect their way
I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal Opera’s Die Meistersinger, in the new production by Kasper Holten. The run of the Royal Opera’s recent productions of Wagner — appalling Tristans, a dire succession of Parsifals, mediocre Rings — hadn’t prepared me for
‘Perhaps in this world nothing ever happens without purpose,’ sings old, blind King Arkel in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, and that at least is something to hold on to. God knows, you need it. Peel away the fairy-tale trappings of Maeterlinck’s original play, and the world of this opera is profoundly cruel. Its characters are
Why set a supremely great play to music? The Winter’s Tale, the play of Shakespeare’s that I love most, has much of his most beautiful and intelligent poetry, as well as some of his most condensed and puzzling lines. Ryan Wigglesworth, in several of the innumerable interviews about his new opera, says he has been
Frank Martin is one of those composers whose work seems to survive only by virtue of constantly renewed neglect. His quite large body of work is well represented in the CD catalogues, but rarely performed in the UK. One of his most powerful works is Le Vin herbé, though his fully-fledged opera on The Tempest
The story so far: in 1986 English National Opera hired Jonathan Miller to direct Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The result was so fresh and funny that it’s been a mainstay of the ENO schedule for more than three decades, to the indignation of hardcore opera fans who can’t understand why audiences keep flocking to
Fully to enjoy Opera North’s new production of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel you need to take a trinocular perspective on it, but you can enjoy it a lot anyway. You could be mystified, if you don’t know the story, by the setting and action, as indeed I was some of the time despite having recently
Kids: who’d have them? Certainly no one who has ever been to the opera. If they’re not murdering you, they’re betraying you, defying orders or throwing themselves into the arms of the nearest unsuitable suitor. What happens when that suitor is a god, or — god forbid — their own brother or sister? Answers came
Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Snow Maiden has not received a professional staging in the UK for 60 years. Think about that for a moment, and what it says about British operatic priorities. Sixty years of Massenet and early Verdi, of Manon Lescaut and Donizetti ‘rediscoveries’. Not that those aren’t worth having, as part of a healthy and
The Barbican website warns us that Ligeti’s opera Le grand macabre ‘contains very strong language and adult themes’. The strong language consists of the four-letter words that are known to everyone and used by most people, and the adult themes are sex/love and death, which this opera has in common with almost any non-comic opera
In Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph regrets the drab field-grey that has replaced his army’s once-colourful uniforms, seeing in it a premonition of an empire — a world — soon to be defeated and broken up. Franz Joseph is present in Act One of Robert Carsen’s new production of Der
For the past few weeks I have been working my way through Decca’s gigantic set of every note Mozart wrote and quite a few that he probably didn’t — 220 CDs in a monumental hernia-inducing box. Chronological listening is not recommended. Mozart was technically a phenomenon, of course, but he didn’t reach maturity of expression,
As the dreaded season of goodwill approaches, the Royal Opera has mounted two revivals of pieces that are interestingly contrasted: Puccini, in the first characteristic and successful opera of his career, though with a lot still to learn, and Offenbach, with the incomplete last work of his career, but a radical departure from all the
The last ten minutes of any Don Giovanni tell you more about a director than the previous two hours. Mozart’s elastic ‘dramma giocoso’ can take a lot of pulling about, can be stretched taut into tragedy or squeezed into the tight confines of a farce, but whatever option (or combination of options) you choose, those
I wonder why ENO has invested in a new production of Berg’s Lulu, when the previous one, which we first saw in 2002 and then in 2005, was so brilliant as to be virtually definitive. (Of course, that last word is anathema to operatic ‘creative’ teams, for obvious reasons.) Not that this new one, directed
When Mozart was commissioned to write an opera for the coronation of Emperor Leopold II, he produced La clemenza di Tito: a hymn to the benevolence of a Roman despot. When Matt Rogers and Sally O’Reilly were commissioned by the Inner Temple, they came up with an opera in which the protagonist is a law
Wexford is to opera-goers what casinos are to gamblers. The uncertainty, the hope, the exhilaration — they’re all a crucial part of a festival that annually rolls the dice, plucking three obscure, often all but unknown, operas from the repertoire and giving them a staging. Dealing the cards is David Agler, the artistic director whose
The Royal Opera’s latest production is Shostakovich’s The Nose and to paraphrase Mark Steyn, whatever else can be said about it, you certainly get a lot of noses for your money. Noses are tossed from character to character, noses kneel in prayer and noses stroll casually past in the background. They poke through curtains, mingle
