Culture

Aristotle wrote that classical tragedy should evoke pity and awe. With Richard Strauss’s Elektra, the awe can be taken as read: a certain irreducible level of epicness is written into the score, even if – like Sir Antonio Pappano on the first night of this new production at the Royal Opera – a conductor takes

Fun fact: Engelbert Humperdinck composed part of Wagner’s Parsifal. Shortly before the première, it was discovered that Wagner’s score didn’t allow time for a crucial scene change. The 27-year-old Humperdinck, then working as Wagner’s assistant, composed a few temporary bars to cover the gap and, rather to his own surprise, found that they met with

London’s two opera houses have been busy staging non-operas. Handel’s English oratorio, Jephtha, is his final exercise in a form that only existed because it was, explicitly, not opera (Georgian theatres needed something to play during Lent). We know better today, and dramatised reboots of Handel oratorios are proliferating, possibly because – unlike his actual

Another week, another attempt to solve the Purcell problem. There’s a problem? Well, yes, if you consider that a composer universally agreed (on the strength of Dido and Aeneas) to be a great musical dramatist left only one stageable opera (that’d be Dido and Aeneas), but hour upon hour of theatre music that’s effectively unperformable

Opera North has launched a ‘Green Season’, which means (among other things) that the sets and costumes for its new Falstaff are recycled. On one level, that’s nothing new: this eternally underfunded company has been performing miracles of sustainability for years now, and there’s usually at least one production each season that looks like it’s

In David Alden’s production of Peter Grimes, the mob assembles before the music has even started – silhouetted at the back, muttering and menacing. Ah, Britten’s mob: simultaneously the source of some of the most electrifying, elemental choral writing since Mussorgsky and a licence for British directors to indulge in premium-strength snobbery. Fully endorsed by

In Northern Ireland Opera’s new Tosca, the curtain rises on a big concrete dish from which a pair of eyes gaze down, impassive. Walls of scaffolding tower on three sides of the stage, creaking as they expand under the heat of the stage lights. Point taken: Cameron Menzies’s production (the sets are by Niall McKeever)

If directors will insist on staging Handel oratorios as if they’re operas, it makes sense to pick Semele, which is practically an opera already. Under George II, opera was banned in London theatres during Lent (too exotick, too irrational), so Handel slipped his best material past the authorities by presenting it in concert format, set

Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set to tunes from the West Side Story guy: what’s not to like? And what can be so wrong with its twinkle-toed score that the combined rewriting efforts (and this is not remotely the full list)

‘Ring out your bells for me, ivory keys! Weave out your spell for me, orchestra please!’ It’s lush stuff, the music of Ivor Novello, and when the Buxton International Festival announced a new musical ‘built around’ his songs, the heart took flight. Novello is one of those fringe passions that are, one suspects, a lot

‘Goodness Triumphant’ is the subtitle of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and you’d better believe he delivers. It’s the sweetest thing imaginable; true, the stepsisters are awful, but their spite bubbles over in streams of such sunny major-key effervescence that it’s hard to hold it against them. As for their father Don Magnifico, you can’t seriously hiss

In opera, as in so much high-budget entertainment, expectation management is half the battle. With its massive Greek Revival mansion, approached through miles of rolling parkland, The Grange Festival has the grandest setting of any of the summer festivals; and that might have something to do with why the opera served up there has so

The three Just Stop Oil protestors were sitting in the stalls, somewhere near the middle of the front row. Someone had shelled out a cool £600 for those tickets – navigating the Glyndebourne website without, somehow, clocking the company’s loudly proclaimed commitment to sustainability (they even produce their own dyes for costumes these days, using

There are a lot of corpses on stage at the end of Charles Edwards’s production of Tristan & Isolde for Grange Park Opera. At this stage in the drama, directors tend to fade out the bloodbath, the better to focus on Isolde’s final dissolution into bliss. But as Michael Tanner argues, Tristan, like the Ring,

Are you supposed to laugh at the end of Don Giovanni? Audiences often do, and they did at the end of Mariame Clément’s new production at Glyndebourne. It’s usually the bit where Donna Anna’s fiancé Don Ottavio suggests that they get married sharpish, and she immediately asks him for a year’s delay. Readers of Middlemarch

Scottish Opera’s new Carmen begins at the end. ‘Take me away: I have killed her,’ intones a voiceover and as the prelude swaggers out, José is in a police interrogation cell, where an investigator is attempting to piece together his story. In other words, it’s CSI: Seville. In converting Meilhac and Halévy’s libretto into a

As stage directions go, the The Magic Flute opens with a zinger. ‘Tamino enters from the right wearing a splendid Japanese hunting costume.’ That’s right, a Japanese hunting costume. What does that even look like? More to the point, what would a Viennese theatrical costume designer in 1791 have thought it looked like? Surviving evidence

The big London companies gave two UK premières in the space of a week, both dealing with the subject of teenagers being shot dead. Kaija Saariaho and Sofi Oksanen’s new opera Innocence was premièred at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2021 and comes to the Royal Opera in exactly the same production by Simon Stone, the

English National Opera has arrived at the Dead City, and who, before Christmas, would have given odds that this new production of Korngold’s Die tote Stadt would ever make it this far? This is late-Romantic music-drama on an exuberant scale; it simply doesn’t lend itself to pubs and car parks (even the reduced version staged

Hector Berlioz dismissed Handel as ‘that tub of pork and beer’ but it wasn’t always like that. Picture a younger, sexier Handel, rocking into Rome aged 22 and challenging Scarlatti to a keyboard duel. The Italian elite couldn’t get enough of Il caro Sassone, ‘the darling Saxon’, and he repaid them with 80-odd short Italian

Tubas and timpani thunder in The Rhinegold as the giants Fasolt and Fafner, having built Valhalla, arrive to claim their fee: Freia, goddess of beauty and youth. It doesn’t go well. Suddenly Fasolt drops his defences and declares his yearning (the translation is John Deathridge’s) for ‘a woman who’d lovingly and softly live with us

Opera North has begun 2023 with a couple of big revivals, and it’s always rewarding to call in on these things and see how they’re holding up. The long-lived, endlessly revived classic production is one of the quirks of operatic culture. It actually feels disconcerting, as a regular operagoer, to go to the conventional theatre

Whoosh! A digital starburst, a sweep of orchestral sound and the stage of the Coliseum is alive with dancing, whirling snowflakes. Floating in the heavens is the soprano Danielle de Niese; below her in the darkness, the truss bridge that we all know – because we’ve all seen It’s a Wonderful Life – is where

The screw may twist and the rack may turn: the Tower of London, in Jo Davies’s new production of The Yeomen of the Guard, is a dark place indeed, and that’s as it should be. ‘Men may bleed and men may burn,’ intones Dame Carruthers, as she delivers a magic lantern show about the history

You wouldn’t like Tamerlano when he’s angry. ‘My heart seethes with rage,’ he sings, in Act III of Handel’s opera – spraying coloratura about the stage like Silly String on a 1980s kids’ TV show. That’s the deal with baroque opera: the emotional register is extreme and you’re either in the moment or you might

The first night of the new season at Covent Garden was cancelled when the solemn news came through. The second opened with a short, respectful speech from Oliver Mears, the director of opera, and a minute’s silence in which the houselights were lowered and we could gaze at the curtains, from which the huge gold-embroidered

The first part of the adventure was getting there. Out of the subway, past the tower blocks and under the motorway flyover. A quick glance at Google Maps and into a patch of litter-blown scrub. Someone bustles up alongside me: ‘Are you looking for the opera?’ I am, yes: and my guess is that the

Delius and Puccini: how’s that for an operatic odd couple? Delius, that most faded of British masters, now remembered largely as a purveyor of wistful aquarelles. And…well, and Puccini. Early, neglected Puccini, true, but this is Opera Holland Park, where they make it their mission to rescue the waifs and strays of Italian late romanticism,