Over the years, one tried and true method of packing audiences in to the concerts of Robert Bass’s Collegiate Chorale has been to present concert opera with impressive soloists.
Martha Graham used to say, “In order for there to be dance, there must be something that needs to be danced.”
When the Met presented La Fille du Régiment for Lily Pons during World War II, she sought permission to wave the Cross of Lorraine, symbol of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French, during the Salut à la France in Act II.
Why does one so seldom encounter Dvořák’s Rusalka on stage?
Satyagraha is an odd duck to encounter if you are seeking a traditional opera-going experience or anything like it.
Victor DeRenzi is a man of convictions — and of courage. Given his commitment to tradition, you might call DeRenzi, artistic director of Sarasota Opera since 1982, conservative.
With what might (if one were risking facetiousness) be termed a “false-set” of four countertenors in the cast, this was always going to be an intriguing production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare for aficionados of a voice type which has revolutionised the perception (and popularity) of baroque opera over the past 15 years.
Harrison Birtwistle’s new full-scale opera, commissioned by the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, is a study of isolation and imprisonment.
It was one of Queler’s good nights.
It is, you might say, the little opera that can. True, if it’s size of the budget, the price of tickets and the number of seats that concerns you, the Komische Oper is clearly the third of Berlin’s opera houses.
What to make of "Lucrezia Borgia"? I have always felt that, some lovely arias notwithstanding, this Donizetti work never really gets going until the slam-bang soprano-baritone duet in Act II.
That Fed Dostoevsky – sure plays a mean pinball!
Plainly put, Frankfurt Opera’s “The Rape of Lucretia” could be offered as a textbook example of just how great a performance can be when everything goes right.
BERLIN — Which car-rental agency was it that was once No. 2 and “trying harder?”
In a climate in which bel canto opera seems to be enjoying a steady and welcome revival, ETO opened their current season with a welcome production of Donizetti's historically dubious account of the latter days of Anne Boleyn. The company's...
The most interesting opera on ETO's Spring 2008 tour was Carlisle Floyd's 1950s tale of religious hypocrisy in the rural Deep South, based on the Apocryphal tale of Susannah and the Elders.
The last of the three operas on ETO's Spring 2008 tour was sung in English, and updated to a Spain of the mid-twentieth century under Franco.
Opera companies often tout new productions as a major attraction of their seasons.
UC Opera's reputation for showcasing rare large-scale works has been boosted this year with the UK premiere of this 1846 opera by Edouard Lalo after a Schiller play.
At the curtain call for the first night of WNO’s new production of the infrequently performed Khovanshchina director David Pountney wore a simple Russian shirt.
![Andrew Shore (Punch) / Lucy Schaufer (Judy) [Copyright Catherine Ashmore/English National Opera]](http://www.operatoday.com/2204ashmore590.png)
English National Opera’s production of Harrison Birtwistle’s ‘Punch and Judy’ is the company’s second collaboration with the Young Vic Theatre — following the premiere of Neuwirth’s ‘Lost Highway’ a few weeks earlier — and remarkably, also the second London production of this early Birtwistle work within a month, the previous one having been at the Linbury Studio Theatre, a collaboration between Music Theatre Wales and the Royal Opera.
ENO has one particular coup up its sleeve. There can be few singers as well-suited to the grotesque, tragic-comic figure of Mr Punch as the baritone Andrew Shore, one of ENO’s most distinguished regular guests and a first-rate singing actor. In full puppet costume, he is the cross between a naughty child, a vicious murderous thug and a sinister nightmare figure — a nightmare which eventually implodes on him with the full force of half-a-dozen Punch clones and the ghosts of his victims.
Giles Cadle’s set and costume designs go all-out to replicate the iconic ‘Punch and Judy show’ look, in primary colours that look slightly shabby and sun-bleached. The stage is a circus-ring with a canopy of brightly-coloured fairy lights. But at the back, a freshly-dug grave is a reminder of the macabre inevitability with which Punch’s serial murders will be carried out.
Ashley Holland strikes an imposing figure as the Choregos, a Greek chorus-like figure who acts as a master of ceremonies, a narrator and moral judge, but who falls victim to Punch just like all the others. It is the Choregos and his murder that first blur the distinction between make-believe and reality, an idea which Daniel Kramer’s staging takes further by stripping away the puppet-costumes from the protagonists as events progress and the moral themes of the piece are developed. Most — including the Doctor and Lawyer, played by Graeme Broadbent and Graham Clark respectively — reach this state of human nakedness at the point at which Punch kills them. As for Punch himself, by the time he comes to feel remorse for the murder of his baby — the first of his crimes — he is no more than a bald, half-dressed, vulnerable human being. Only Gillian Keith’s ringletted, hyperactive doll of a Pretty Polly remains in ‘character', a fantasy figure to the last.
Birtwistle’s brutally uncompromising score — which supposedly upset Benjamin Britten so much at the work’s premiere that he walked out of the performance — is usually subtle and understated, atonal but far from tuneless. It juxtaposes banal nursery-ditties with ‘Passion chorales’ and tragic monologue. The insouciance of the little motif with which Punch shrugs off each murder strikes a vivid contrast with the murdered Judy’s plea for Punch’s reform, sung by the versatile American mezzo Lucy Schaufer.
Credit is due to the cast for managing to get the majority of Steven Pruslin’s wordplay-filled libretto across, and to conductor Leo Hussain (sharing the opera’s five-night run with ENO’s Music Director, Edward Gardner) for maintaining such dramatic coherence in the music.
A scene from Punch and Judy
Ruth Elleson © 2008