One of opera’s most awesome scores came, finally, to the the War Memorial Opera House stage, arriving with flying colors in stage director Matthew Ozawa’s fine new, bigtop-like production. An…
Category: Reviews
Glyndebourne travels to the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury
Desire, disease and death are inseparable in Puccini’s La bohème. As Rodolfo says to Marcello in Act 3, when he explains why he is leaving Mimì, despite his love for…
Richard Jones brings a wry twist to Alcina’s magic powers at the Royal Opera House
‘The Only Path’. So reads the insignia emblazoned on the drop curtain, as the overture to Alcina strikes up in the Royal Opera House pit at the start of Richard…
WNO’s La bohème at the Birmingham Hippodrome
Annabel Arden’s production of La bohème is ten years old now, but somehow I’ve contrived not to encounter it during my visits to the Birmingham Hippodrome during the last decade. …
Mortality and meaning: Welsh National Opera’s superb Makropulos Case at the Birmingham Hippodrome
Elina Makropulos, the ‘heroine’ of Leoš Janáček’s 1925 opera The Makropulos Case (Věc Makropulos), has been alive for 337 years, her longevity prolonged by an experimental potion given to her…
A masterly traversal of Duparc songs
The habit among composers of almost excessive self-criticism has been a curiously French phenomenon over the last century, typified by Dukas, Duruflé and his younger, more progressive contemporary Henri Dutilleux.…
To La Scala Picturehouse, for an intriguing triple bill at Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Nino Rota’s one-act radio opera, Il due timidi, was composed for Radio Audizioni Italiane and first broadcast in November 1950. Its first London performance took place at the Scala Theatre…
Fine collaborations between Claude Debussy & Mikko Franck
Some twenty years ago Finnish conductor Mikko Franck, then in his early 20s, was considered classical music’s Next Best Thing: his debut conducting disc with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra…
Ernani at Lyric Opera of Chicago
Giuseppe Verdi’s early masterpiece Ernani returned to Lyric Opera of Chicago in a production featuring several outstanding singers. The role of Ernani is sung by Russell Thomas, the part of…
The Rape of Lucretia at Snape Maltings
The myth of Lucretia, first told by Livy, tells of the rape of Collatinus’s eponymous wife by his fellow soldier, Tarquinius, the son of the Etruscan king who rules over…