Year: 2018

Having premiered Roxanna Panufnik’s opera Silver Birch in 2017 as part of its work with local community groups, Garsington Opera’s 2018 season included its first commission for the main opera season. David Sawer’s The Skating Rink premiered at Garsington Opera this week; the opera is based on the novel by Chilean writer Roberto Bolano with a libretto by playwright Rory Mullarkey.

The Princeton Festival brings a run of three high-quality opera
performances to town each summer, alternating between a modern opera and a
traditional warhorse. John Adams’ Nixon in China has been
announced for next summer. So this year Princeton got Giacomo
Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, for which the Festival
assembled an impressive cast and delivered a polished performance.

Many of the ingredients for a memorable concert were there, or so they
initially seemed to be. Alas, ultimately what we learned more clearly than
anything else was that the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s
new Principal Artist, András Schiff, is no conductor.

It came as quite a surprise throughout much of the first half of this recital of French song, that it was the piano-playing of Susan Manoff that made the greater impression upon me than the singing of VÈronique Gens.

What might have been? Such was a thought that came to my mind more than once during this, the premiere of Glyndebourne’s new PellÈas et MÈlisande. What might have been if Stefan Herheim had not changed his Konzept so late in the day? (I had actually forgotten about that until reminded during the interval, yet had already began to wonder whether the production had been, especially for him, unusually rushed.)

There is something very Danish about this Don Giovanni. It isn’t just that the director, Kasper Holten is a Dane, it’s also that the existential, moral and psychological questions Holten asks point to Kierkegaard who wrote of the fusion of the erotic and demonic in this opera in his work Either/Or (1843). However, I’ve rarely, if ever, encountered a production of Don Giovanni – even Bieito’s notorious one for ENO – where Mozart comes off as second best.

Schoenberg Gurrelieder at the Royal Festival Hall, with Esa-Pekka Salonen, demonstrating how well the Philharmonia Orchestra has absorbed Schoenberg’s idiom. A blazing performance, formidably dramatic, executed with stunning assurance. Salonen has made his mark on the Philharmonia through in-depth explorations of the 20th century repertoire he loves so well.

London may have been basking in the golden glow of summer sunshine this week, but things have been darkly gothic on the capital’s opera scene.

There was a palpable anticipatory buzz in the audience well before one note was heard of Pacific Opera Project’s adventurous take on Rossini’s seldom staged La Gazzetta (The Newspaper).