The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
This week’s opera-going afforded one example of truly great art, and one of its plausible counterfeit. To deal with the latter first: no one can deny that Billy Budd is one of Britten’s most accomplished pieces, a virtuoso exercise in the use of large orchestral forces, and in restriction to male post-pubescent singers. And musically
Welsh National Opera’s new production of La Bohème, which I saw last week in Birmingham, is striking in a variety of ways, but its outstanding feature is the conducting of Carlo Rizzi. One tends to think that of all operas Bohème can look after itself, and up to a point that is true. Bashed out
It struck me for the first time at the latest revival of David McVicar’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salome that this opera, Strauss’s first to maintain a place in the repertory, and its successor Elektra are, for all their differences, companion pieces. Even before reading the late Patrick O’Connor’s excellent article ‘Happy Families’, the best
English Touring Opera ended its spring tour in Cambridge this year with three performances of The Barber of Seville and two of Eugene Onegin, both in English translation, the former done without surtitles, the latter with. Neither of them really needed them, since the Arts Theatre is small and most of the singers enunciated with
It’s taken me a shockingly long time to realise how great Verdi’s Falstaff is, and I still wouldn’t agree that it is his greatest opera, which fully paid-up Verdians tend to think. It may be a measure of my progress, though, that I got a lot of pleasure out of the new production at Covent
Pharmaceutical considerations were uppermost in my mind as I made my way to the Barbican Hall for Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, a production which began touring in Michigan in January and ends in Hong Kong next March. I imagine that marijuana is probably the best preparation and accompaniment for seeing it, but that
The new production of Wagner’s first indisputable masterpiece The Flying Dutchman by English National Opera is a decided success, the best account of what contemporary producers make strangely heavy weather of that I have seen in decades. For some reason they find it hard to focus on the title role, and make it all a
Weber’s Der Freischütz is the finest neglected opera in or hovering on the edge of the canon. It’s not entirely bewildering why it should be, but there are ways of coping with structural defects, which is what it suffers from. Yet I don’t think there has been a UK performance of it since Edinburgh in
Considering how close, if mysterious, the links are between being gay and loving opera, it could seem surprising that there are almost no operas explicitly on gay subjects. Many of Britten’s operas heave with homoerotic subtexts, but his only opera to come out is his last, Death in Venice, and that’s paedophiliac. Tippett, always wackier
Lightning struck, after what must surely be one of the most dreary seasons at the Royal Opera, with a revival of Rigoletto. You never know. I haven’t been an admirer of John Eliot Gardiner, either in the pre-classical repertoire in which he made his name, or in his excursions into more recent orchestral and operatic
Of all the operatic ventures that have sprung up in England in the past 20 years, Birmingham Opera Company may well be the most remarkable. Its artistic director is Graham Vick, who is well acquainted with opera at its most elitist — he was artistic director of Glyndebourne from 1994 to 2000. BOC is at
‘Praising! That’s it!’ Rilke exclaims in one of his ecstatic Sonnets to Orpheus. It seems to be an unconditional injunction, but he hadn’t tried being an opera critic, and I’d like to see anyone even try plausibly to praise either of the two productions I saw this week. One was new and absolutely terrible, the
Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune, whose UK première was at the Royal Opera last week, has received the severest critical panning I can recall for any new opera. It is no masterpiece, but I wonder why it has been rounded on when so many new — not to mention old — pieces with no more going
Tristan und Isolde is a perfect opera, but where are the perfect performers and, just as important, the perfect listeners to do it justice? What very often happens to me in a fine performance is that I am wholly caught up in the drama of Act I, which, for all its revolutionary musical means, is
A few weeks ago I was speculating anxiously on the possibility that even the greatest masterpieces, in opera or other art forms, might be exhaustible, or that anyway I might not be able to find anything fresh in them, and therefore might succumb either to a state of mild boredom, or else, like some critics,
Is any opera more frustrating than Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann? It persistently arouses hopes which it almost as persistently fails to realise. Because there is no such thing as an authoritative text, one always hopes that a new production will have hit on a solution to its numerous problems. I’ve seen enough accounts of
They are lighting the candles at Covent Garden to honour one of the great singers of our age. Thomas Allen (as he was then) first appeared on the stage of the Royal Opera House in 1972, as Donald in Billy Budd, when Benjamin Britten was alive and his opera not nearly so highly thought of
Bellini’s Norma is an opera that I not only adore: it obsesses me, too. Whenever I listen to it, I have to hear it again very soon, and parts of it lodge in my mind, playing over and over again, to an extent that very few other pieces do. It was the work through which
When you see two of the undisputed masterpieces of the repertoire in one week in one of the world’s leading opera houses, competently performed, and remain largely unmoved, you’re bound to ask yourself the question: have I been to these things, and heard them on record, too many times? It is, after all, possible to
The Enchanted Island is a baroque concoction at the New York Met which has been widely touted and last Saturday was relayed worldwide to cinemas, a transmission that went less smoothly than any I have seen before, with some sharp variations of volume and a temporary complete breakdown. On the whole, the sound level is
Giulio Cesare was the first of Handel’s operas to return to general favour after more than a century and a half of neglect, and I suppose that it is still the most frequently performed. That isn’t surprising, since its plot is, by Handelian standards, simplicity itself, and the level of inspiration in the arias is
As I’m not the first person to have pointed out, the Royal Opera has indulged in a truly phenomenal number of performances of La Traviata this season, in the largely traditional production by Richard Eyre, which opened in 1994 with Angela Gheorghiu making her name. The three main roles have been cast differently for these
‘It is impossible that you should not have sensed,’ wrote Wagner to Ludwig II shortly before the first performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ‘under the opera’s quaint superficies of popular humour, the profound melancholy, the lament, the cry of distress of poetry in chains, and its reincarnation, its new birth, its irresistible magic power
Bernard Levin once wrote an article in the Times called ‘But seriously, how can anyone compare Verdi with Wagner?’ (or something very like that). I can’t remember the article in detail, but its drift was ‘No one can seriously compare them’, something that I had and have always felt. Yet there is the temptation: they
Having seen and been most impressed by two New York Met relays of Wagner operas on the big screen, I was interested to see how the largely close-up medium would cope with a Handel opera, where the challenges are quite different. Both composers have single characters singing for large stretches of time, but, while Wagner’s
This year’s Christmas offering at the Royal Opera is yet a further revival of Richard Eyre’s production of La Traviata, which began the season and is being revived again early in 2012. The main reason I went again to an opera for which I usually feel distaste was to see and hear Simon Keenlyside in
Dante didn’t have the foresight to create or depict a circle of the Inferno designed expressly for opera critics, with intrepid explorers of new operas with social agendas as an extra. That was left for almost seven centuries until the Royal Opera House came up with the idea of the Linbury Studio Theatre, which answers
ENO’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has created something of a stir by departing from the house almost-tradition of postmodernist, stunningly intrusive and invariably grotesquely irrelevant presentations that began in earnest sometime last year. The set designs for this opera, by Tom Pye, and the costumes, by Chloe Obolensky, update it to the late
Thanks to the generosity of friends, Mrs Spencer and I went to the opera the other week, an exceptionally rare event. Having grown up with the rougher edges of pop and rock music, the trained voices of opera singers always strike me as being artificial and overblown. And there is something about the snooty splendour