According to the publicity for this latest revival of La Cenerentola at Palais Garnier, first unveiled in 2017, Guillaume Gallienne sets the work in Naples and situates the characters “on the edge…
Author: David Truslove
Entertainment & Heartbreak at Garsington’s Der Rosenkavalier
Time as a great healer or gentle eraser is a large part of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. If musing on transience and ageing are prevailing themes, that’s neatly balanced by the light…
Exceptional Student Performances of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia from The Royal Academy of Music
“It’s not exactly a work you enjoy” were words I overheard during the interval of this hugely impressive production of Britten’s first chamber opera given by Royal Academy of Music…
Remarkable Performances from Hurn Court Opera’s La Traviata at Winchester’s Theatre Royal
Hurn Court Opera has come a long way since its creation by founder Lynton Atkinson in 2017. Established to showcase the talents of emerging singers on the threshold of their…
A Musically Superb Flying Dutchman from Welsh National Opera
A woman in labour, a birth and a death launch this new production of Wagner’s first mature opera about the legendary Dutchman condemned to sail the seas until a wife…
East and West meet at Opéra Bastille with Nixon in China
There can be few, if any, operas which feature a grand gathering of table-tennis players. Bizaare that may be, it’s not so unreasonable if you’re aware of the link between…
Fun-Filled and Pocket-Sized Gianni Schicchi from OperaUpClose
Dead bodies are the stuff of operas. No less so with Puccini in this vividly reimagined Gianni Schicchi which begins with a just dead but still-warm corpse lying in a…
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s Temple to Consumerism Consolidated in English National Opera’s Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
First performed in Leipzig in 1930 within the shadow of the Weimar Republic, the clue to Brecht and Weill’s dystopian opera lies in its title. There was nothing in this…
The UK Premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Climate-Motivated unEarth Attempts to Pack a Significant Message, but Musically Feels Limp
We’ve been there before with protest music or music aiming to generate change. And music can prompt desired responses – environmental, social or political – including works like Haydn’s ‘Farewell’…
Strong Personalities Enliven ENO’s HMS Pinafore
Not so much a fearsome man-o’-war, this HMS Pinafore was more a tea clipper with a crew of jolly tars that could have come straight from the long-running radio series…