The Royal Opera’s venerable production of Tosca – now in its seventeenth revival – is still a great one, but after my third visit in five or so years I…
Category: Performances
A vivid concert performance of Handel’s Orlando brings out its magical elements
In the midst of appearances at Garsington Opera as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Iestyn Davies took the title role in one of the sorts of Baroque opera that…
Maximum emotional impact concludes a magnificent Ring cycle from Longborough
Longborough’s last two segments of Der Ring des Nibelungen outline the rise and fall of Siegfried, the demise of the Gods and the eventual return of the Ring to the…
Parts 1 and 2 of the Ring Cycle cherished at Longborough Festival Opera
Der Ring des Nibelungen is the centre piece of this year’s Longborough Festival – all four instalments of Wagner’s epic staged over three successive weeks. That the performances take place…
Revolutions: A magical evening of six new operas by young composers at the Royal College of Music
Often a reviewer’s evening spent at the opera has little to do with the future of the art – arguably, we might sometimes be thinking it is the opposite. The…
Caesar in Saint Louis: Prima La Musica
A musically resplendent presentation of Georg Frideric Handel’s Julius Caesar covered Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in glory. Guilio Cesare in Egitto is number one on Handel’s operatic hit parade…
Saint Louis: Star Gazing with Galileo
You don’t need a telescope to spot the stars in Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ winning and sumptuous production of Philip Glass and Mary Zimmerman’s Galileo Galilei. They are all…
Così fan tutte at the Royal Opera House
Jan Philipp Gloger’s rendition of Così fan tutte places Daniel Heartz’s assessment of the work as an ‘opera about an opera’ centre stage. It is a so-called meta-reading. Thus, for…
L’Orfeo at Cremona’s Monteverdi Festival
The stage director informed us that this Orfeo was effected through the lens of quantum physics and the Schrödinger paradox. Be that as it may, it was a splendid L’Orfeo…
Getting Beneath the Surface: Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte in Princeton
On its face, no opera seems trashier than Così fan tutte. Two best bros bet on the fidelity of their young fiancées, disguise themselves as exotic strangers, and try to…