Jan Philipp Gloger’s rendition of Così fan tutte places Daniel Heartz’s assessment of the work as an ‘opera about an opera’ centre stage. It is a so-called meta-reading. Thus, for…
Month: June 2024
L’Orfeo at Cremona’s Monteverdi Festival
The stage director informed us that this Orfeo was effected through the lens of quantum physics and the Schrödinger paradox. Be that as it may, it was a splendid L’Orfeo…
Getting Beneath the Surface: Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte in Princeton
On its face, no opera seems trashier than Così fan tutte. Two best bros bet on the fidelity of their young fiancées, disguise themselves as exotic strangers, and try to…
Garsington’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is long on mystery & short on magic
Netia Jones’s new staging of Britten and Pears’s take on Shakespeare’s play creates plenty of mystery, though not necessarily the kind that’s easy to appreciate. Her single monochrome set intrigues…
Welsh National Opera’s Outstanding Il trittico
Within the last year or so Welsh National Opera has produced some remarkable productions including two unforgettable stagings of Candide and Death in Venice. Now, Puccini’s Il trittico has begun…
Intellectually serious but searing take on Monteverdi’s masterpiece
Having presented Handel’s Agrippina in 2018 – wittily reinterpreting Nero’s accession to power as the Grange Festival’s assumption of the role of company in residence at the Grange, Northington, after the…
A trenchant production of Tosca which moves its Roman setting into a more recent era of Italian history
Alongside a production of Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea, the Grange Festival present another opera set in Rome against the backdrop of the tyrannical exercise of power, albeit nearly two…
Heart-rending Kátya Kabanová from Grange Park Opera
Guilt, shame and suicide are not everyone’s cup of tea when it comes to country house opera. And if Janáček’s angst-ridden masterpiece is not the obvious stimulant you’re hoping for,…
La Vestale in Paris
Though composed in 1805 Gaspare Spontini’s La Vestale reached the Paris Opera stage finally in 1807, and then only because Empress Josephine intervened. The empress would not have been amused just now…
Partenope in San Francisco
Unlike many of the recycled productions at San Francisco Opera, Christopher Alden’s famed 2008 production of Handel’s comedy Partenope, just now on the War Memorial stage, has lost none of…