I didn’t see Peter Relton’s production of Tosca for Grange Park Opera when it inaugurated the company’s new Theatre in the Woods at West Horsley in 2017, so it was…
Category: Reviews
A double bill of Gluck and Purcell which dances, ducks and dives at The Grange Festival
Reviewing Daniel Slater’s production of Handel’s Tamerlano at The Grange Festival last year, I remarked that there was ‘so little directorial intervention that what few such gestures there are stick…
Saariaho’s Adriana Mater in San Francisco
June in San Francisco may become one of the world’s great opera festivals. In recent years the San Francisco Symphony has added a staged opera in its concert hall to…
Madama Butterfly in San Francisco
Japanese stage director Amon Miyamoto’s Madama Butterfly was first seen in Tokyo, then traveled to Dresden before arriving just now in San Francisco. Unlike Puccini who made the tiny Japanese…
An underwhelming Il trovatore at the Royal Opera House
There are those productions that linger in the memory for months, even years. Then there are those that fade all too quickly from consciousness, consigned to history and best forgotten.…
A superb cast make Tim Albery’s enigmatic Mitridate at Garsington compelling
Mozart had already got three operas under his belt – as well as numerous oratorios and masses, symphonies and sonatas – when the fourteen-year-old prodigy was commissioned to compose an…
A stylish, sunny Il barbiere di Siviglia at Garsington
Simon Higlett’s stylish designs handsomely set the scene for Christopher Luscombe’s new production of Il barbiere di Siviglia at Garsington, transporting us to the narrow, cobbled streets of that Spanish…
A magnificent Götterdämmerung at Longborough
With two Ring cycles completed some twenty years ago and another due next year, it’s not for nothing Longborough Festival Opera is known as the Bayreuth of the Cotswolds. All…
Rigoletto opens Opera Holland Park’s 2023 season
Director Cecilia Stinton sets out her stall in no uncertain terms during the overture to her new production of Verdi’s Rigoletto at Opera Holland Park. As conductor Lee Reynolds whips…
Style, imagination & not a little daring: a new staging of Handel’s Saul at Berlin’s Komische Oper
Over the Whitsun weekend, the Komische Oper in Berlin had something of a Handel festival on with revivals of Barrie Kosky’s production of Handel’s Semele and Stefan Herheim’s production of…