Category: Performances

Much has been promised of London Lyric Opera. The newest company on the capital’s opera scene, it will collaborate with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra to specialise in full-scale concert performances with high-profile soloists.

Brussels’ reliably excellent De Munt/La Monnaie Opera served up a Rusalka that was theatrically vivid, musically resplendent, and cheered to the rafters at its premiere.

Elektra begins with an explosion and remains, with a few lyric interludes, on that extreme pitch throughout its two hours.

Glyndebourne Touring Opera has long been bringing its wares to the further reaches of the southern United Kingdom and its current package of Hansel und Gretel, Carmen and The Magic Flute has been drawing good crowds from Norwich in the east to Plymouth in the south-west.

The bad luck of last season’s Tristans seems to be edging into the present one — but the curse now finds the house better prepared for trouble.

Like Seville’s peripatetic barber, Gran Teatro del Liceu’s new Marriage of Figaro is rather all over the place.

It was, of course, coincidence. When the Chicago Lyric Opera scheduled George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for the current season, not even the preludes to the 2008 presidential election had begun.

Not all of Munich’s holiday delights are to be found at the just-opened annual Christmas Market filling the Marienplatz and environs.

From the director’s point of view, there are two ways to approach staging an opera.

The opening performance of the ROH’s seventh revival of John Schlesinger’s 1980 production of The Tales of Hoffmann was
dedicated to the memory of Richard Hickox.