Category: Performances

Of their two tours per year, English Touring Opera tends to channel the majority of the budget into the Spring season, and the Autumn tour – despite a focus in recent years on some high-quality Baroque chamber works, which lend themselves well to the size of the venues around the UK which the company visits – can be rather noticeably the poor relation.

What opera contains a terrific overture, a wedding sextet, two murderous magical potions, a mad scene for coloratura soprano, a magnificent a cappella aria for contralto, dozens of glorious melodies and lots of nifty choral writing?

I was just itching to experience the new Oslo Opera House ever since I saw the pictures of its grand opening (ahead of schedule, thank-you-very-much) last April.

Is Boston Baroque period performance’s best kept secret?

Mary Zimmerman’s unmusical production of Lucia certainly improves if you give it a cast of singers who know what Donizetti is about.

The fascination of Don Giovanni lies not only in the bejeweled score but in the interplay of its eight intriguing characters, each based on an ancient type, yet each somehow cut loose from the formula da Ponte molded so well.

Pimlico Opera is based at the Grange in Hampshire, home of the Grange Park opera festival, but pre-dates its sister company by a decade and has been giving national tours of popular operas since the 1980s as well as doing some pioneering opera and music theatre projects in UK prisons.

The good news (make that “great news”) is that conductor Dennis Russell Davies had total command over this ever-shifting composition, one minute lyrical and introspective, the next soaring and rhapsodic, the next percussive and agitated.

In recent years it’s the headgear of the ice-hearted princess that is often the major source of awe and excitement in productions of Puccini’s incomplete final opera.