Sitting through Tosca – and how we see and hear it these days – does sometimes make one feel one hasn’t been to the opera but to a boxing match. Joseph Kerman’s lurid, inspired or plain wrong-headed description of this opera as ‘a shabby little shocker’ was at least half right in this tenth revival of Jonathan Kent’s production.
Category: Reviews
A life-affirming Vixen at the Royal Academy of Music
‘It will be a dream, a fairy tale that will warm your heart’: so promised a preview article in MoravskÈ noviny designed to whet the appetite of the Brno public before the first performance of Leoö Jan·?ek’s The Cunning Little Vixen at the town’s Na hradb·ch Theatre on 6th November 1924.
Peter Sellars’ kinaesthetic vision of Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro
On 24th May 1594 just a few weeks before his death on 14 June, the elderly Orlando di Lasso signed the dedication of his Lagrime di San Pietro – an expansive cycle of seven-voice penitential madrigale spirituali, setting vernacular poetry on the theme of Peter’s threefold denial of Christ – to Pope Clement VIII.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: Donnerstag aus Licht
Stockhausen was one of the most visionary of composers, and no more so than in his Licht operas, but what you see can often get in the way of what you hear. I’ve often found fully staged productions of his operas a distraction to the major revelation in them – notably the sonorities he explores, of the blossoming, almost magical acoustical chrysalis, between voices and instruments.
David McVicar’s Andrea ChÈnier returns to Covent Garden
Is Umberto’s Giordano’s Andrea Chenier a verismo opera? Certainly, he is often grouped with Mascagni, Cilea, Leoncavallo and Puccini as a representative of this ‘school’. And, the composer described his 1876 opera as a dramma de ambiente storico.
Glyndebourne presents Richard Jones’s new staging of La damnation de Faust
Oratorio? Opera? Cantata? A debate about the genre to which Berlioz’s ‘dramatic legend’, La damnation de Faust, should be assigned could never be ‘resolved’.
Jean Sibelius: Kullervo
Why did Jean Sibelius suppress Kullervo (Op. 7, 1892)? There are many theories why he didn’t allow it to be heard after its initial performances, though he referred to it fondly in private. This new recording, from Hyperion with Thomas Dausgaard conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, soloists Helena Juntunen and Benjamin Appl and the Lund Male Chorus, is a good new addition to the ever-growing awareness of Kullervo, on recording and in live performance.
Hampstead Garden Opera presents Partenope-on-sea
“Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside!
I do like to be beside the sea!”
And, it was off to the Victorian seaside that we went for Hampstead Garden Opera’s production of Handel’s Partenope – not so much for a stroll along the prom, rather for boisterous battles on the beach and skirmishes by the shore.
Henze’s Phaedra: Linbury Theatre, ROH
A song of love and death, loss and renewal. Opera was born from the ambition of Renaissance humanists to recreate the oratorical and cathartic power of Greek tragedy, so it is no surprise that Greek myths have captivated composers of opera, past and present, offering as they do an opportunity to engage with the essential human questions in contexts removed from both the sacred and the mundane.
Actress x Stockhausen Sin {x} II – a world premiere
Is it in any sense aspirational to imitate – or even to try to create something original – based on one of Stockhausen’s works? This was a question I tried to grapple with at the world premiere of Actress x Stockhausen Sin {x} II.