First performed at this year’s Brighton Festival and originally designed for the Theatre Royal Brighton, this multi-media staging of Benjamin Britten’s five Canticles by long-standing collaborators Neil Bartlett and Paule Constable, also had an outing at Snape Maltings Aldeburgh in May this year, and has now arrived on the austere stage of the Linbury Studio at the Royal Opera House.
Category: Performances
Central City Opera: Rocky Mountain High
Central City Opera’s meticulous staging of Our Town makes as good a case as is likely possible for Ned Rorem’s operatic version of that classic play.
Macbeth, Blackheath Halls
Since its inception in 2006, the annual community opera at Blackheath Halls has become a favourite fixture in the local summer calendar.
Britten’s Curlew River and The Prodigal Son
Poised between ritual and drama, between East and West, between Zen-Buddhist
symbolism and Christian medieval morality play, Britten’s three church parables pose some tricky problems — including a deliberately objectivised framing device which can distance the work from the audience, and, unusually for Britten, some less than effective musico-dramatic pacing.
Musical Fireworks in Iowa
‘Tis the season for aerial starbursts, and for my money more than a few rockets could be sent up to laud Des Moines Metro Opera.
La Rondine, Royal Opera House
La Rondine isn’t Puccini’s finest moment. As drama it’s a retread of La BohËme. The music resembles out-takes from Madama Butterfly. What holds it together is Magda.
Rameau Hippolyte et Aricie, Glyndebourne
Glyndebourne revitalizes Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie. Baroque tastes were extravagant. Louis XIV, Le Roi Soleil, and his successor Louis XV, epitomized the aesthetic: audacity, not gentility, vigour, not timidity.
Bizet : Pearl Fishers, Opera Holland Park London
Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers confirms the composer’s deftness in penning a good tune and spinning a faux-Oriental orchestral fabric. But, opera is more than simply a catchy melody or two, and if it wasn’t for the tenor-baritone friendship duet ‘Au Fond du Temple Saint’, the opera’s one-dimensional characters and dramatic stiltedness would probably see it consigned to the drawer marked ‘lesser-known, justly neglected’.
Thomas Hampson Simon Boccanegra, Royal Opera House London
Thomas Hampson’s first Simon Boccanegra at the Royal Opera House makes this revival of Verdi’s great opera worthwhile. It’s a role which suits a singer of Hampson’s intelligence.
Ermonela Jaho — Singing and Character
Ermonela Jaho caused a sensation at Covent Garden in London five years ago, when she took over Violetta at short notice from Anna Netrebko.