La bohème

Thursday

Richard Bratby

A thoroughly enjoyable grand old heap of nothing: The Excursions of Mr Broucek reviewed

Sir David Pountney, it appears, has been to Prague. He’s booked himself a mini-break, he’s EasyJetted out, and after (one assumes) necking a couple of pints of unfiltered Pilsner, he’s splurged the entire design budget for Janacek’s The Excursions of Mr Broucek on the loudest tourist tat that the Mala Strana has to offer. Scale it up, pile it on stage; job’s a good ’un. There’s a snow globe and a Lenin candle; there are dinky toy houses and a cardboard pop-up of the Charles Bridge. A massive souvenir plate (badly cracked) hangs over the stage, blazoned with a panorama of Hradcany Hill and the single word – at least

Thursday

Richard Bratby

Astonishing, if unnecessary, grandstanding: Barbara Hannigan’s La voix humaine reviewed

I think it was when she leaned forward and balanced on one leg that Barbara Hannigan jumped the shark. It wasn’t just a question of physical agility, although that was impressive enough. Hannigan performed her on-the-spot acrobatics while singing; the results were projected on to a big screen by three remote-controlled cameras, which zoomed in on her eyes, merged blurry images of her face and occasionally froze, meaningfully, on a particularly arresting posture. She did all this at the same time as conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in Poulenc’s one-woman opera La voix humaine, though that wasn’t really what this was about; at least, not by the time she was

Thursday

Alexandra Coghlan

The finest Falstaff you’ll see this summer

Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency — a constellation of shifting risk factors, many beyond control, any of which can kill a joke deader than Dogecoin. Opera is already at a disadvantage. Timing — comedy’s accelerant of choice — is predetermined, dictated by the demands of unwieldy choruses and slow-moving sets, pinned down to the second by a score whose creator may be anything but a natural comedian. Just ask Verdi, whose early farce Un Giorno di Regno was such a comprehensive flop that he gave up the genre altogether for almost an entire career. But at

Thursday

Richard Bratby

I pounded my car horn like a Neapolitan cabbie: ENO’s drive-in Bohème reviewed

The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time slot, you may not be allowed entry.’ Perhaps, to habitual London drivers — if such people exist — negotiating the residential streets of Muswell Hill during a Saturday rush hour is all good clean urban fun. I couldn’t say. I just know that by the time I’d been marshalled into a parking space at Alexandra Palace, my no-claims bonus miraculously still intact, I was in no mood for an evening of updated and interval-free Puccini. Three hours later I was pounding my car horn like a Neapolitan cabbie. ENO’s announcement