Lieder

A spirited attempt to fix a show that’s never really flown: Utopia, Limited reviewed

Utopia, Limited (1893) is a rare bird, and one that every Gilbert and Sullivan completist simply has to bag. The point of completism, of course, is to acquire an overview: if artists are truly original, everything they created should illuminate the whole. But what if a career tailed off, or ran to seed? It’s just going to be depressing, isn’t it? By the time they began their penultimate opera, Gilbert and Sullivan hadn’t collaborated for three years. In fact, they’d barely spoken. Goaded back into harness, they produced a comedy that really ought to have sparkled and yet somehow… well, put it this way: even the late D’Oyly Carte company

Astonishing, relentlessly pleasurable rediscovery – tantric opera: Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato reviewed

I don’t say this lightly, but after 20 years of opera-going, Luigi Rossi’s Il Palazzo incantato might just be the most baffling opera I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen Stockhausen’s Licht. It starts with 27 named roles and originally featured no fewer than ten castrati among its cross-dressing, all-male cast. This operatic game of Twister was premièred in Rome in 1642, where it originally played out over seven scintillating hours and nearly 3,000 verses of poetry written, incidentally, by the man who would go on to become Pope Clement IX. A plot based on Ariosto’s sorcerers-and-Saracens epic Orlando Furioso brings together every character you’ve heard of (and lots that you