Last year the world’s opera companies presented only nine staged runs of BÈla BartÚk’s Bluebeard’s Castle.
Month: March 2020
The Queen of Spades at Lyric Opera of Chicago
If obsession is key to understanding the dramatic and musical fabric of Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades, the current production at Lyric Opera of Chicago succeeds admirably in portraying such aspects of the human psyche.
WNO revival of Carmen in Cardiff
Unveiled by Welsh National Opera last autumn, this Carmen is now in its first revival. Original director Jo Davies has abandoned picture postcard Spain and sun-drenched vistas for images of grey, urban squalor somewhere in modern-day Latin America.
Lise Davidsen ‘rescues’ Tobias Kratzer’s Fidelio at the Royal Opera House
Making Fidelio – Beethoven’s paean to liberty, constancy and fidelity – an emblem of the republican spirit of the French Revolution is unproblematic, despite the opera’s censor-driven ‘Spanish’ setting.
A sunny, insouciant CosÏ from English Touring Opera
Beach balls and parasols. Strolls along the strand. Cocktails on the terrace. Laura Attridge’s new production of CosÏ fan tutte which opened English Touring Opera’s 2020 spring tour at the Hackney Empire, is a sunny, insouciant and often downright silly affair.