Year: 2009

After a problematic debut last Autumn with Der fliegende Holl‰nder at the Barbican, London’s newest opera-in-concert outfit returned this month with Fidelio at the smaller Cadogan Hall.

It is not often that the team of stage director, set and costume designer get the biggest, most boisterously rowdy roar of approval at opera’s end.

To say that Dr Atomic landed in London with a bang is shocking, but the subject it deals with is meant to be disturbing. Unlike the scientists at Los Alamos, we can’t live in denial of the wider implications. This isn’t history. It’s a universal dilemma, utterly relevant today.

Jonathan Miller’s new production of Puccini’s wintry opera was denied its planned opening night on Monday 2nd February by a bout of unusually heavy snow which brought most of London’s transport services to a halt and turned it into a virtual ghost town (thus, up the road at Covent Garden, the cancellation of a performance of Korngold’s ‘Die tote Stadt’ was equally ironic).

There is a visceral pleasure in hearing so many healthy sets of young lungs tearing into this music, and they do sing, they do not bellow.