‘The Rules’ define a male-centric world as oppressive and restrictive as Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. Kings rule by divine right. Gender is binary. The value of a woman is her purity.…
Category: Performances
Welsh National Opera: Ainadamar at the Mayflower, Southampton
Spain is ‘a country of death, a country open to death’ once declared the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It’s an assertion that provides a foretaste of Ainadamar, Osvaldo…
Médée at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s lyric tragedy Médée premiered in 1694 with its dedicatee, Louis XIV, in attendance. The five-act libretto adapted by Thomas Corneille from Euripides’ play retells one of the most…
L’amore dei tre re at La Scala, Milan
Following its 1913 world premiere at the Teatro alla Scala, Italo Montemezzi’s L’amore dei tre re (The Love of Three Kings) immediately entered the standard repertory both in Italy and…
Salome at the Staatsoper Hamburg
The recent production of Richard Strauss’s Salome at the Staatsoper Hamburg, one of Germany’s major companies, has received rapturous reviews. Its main virtue is the assumption of the title role…
The Elixir of Love in San Francisco
That’s L’elisir d’amore, Donizetti’s bel canto gem, dolled up somewhere on the Italian riviera by the same team that set San Francisco Opera’s 2012 Lohengrin in a Soviet era, bookless…
Anthony Roth Costanzo makes his debut at Wigmore Hall with La Nuova Musica
On the page this looked rather a rag-bag sort of programme. Some early Mozart opera seria arias and songs, alongside two of Gluck’s best-known arias from Orfeo ed Euridice, welded…
Musically powerful Don Giovanni from Glyndebourne
First unveiled at Glyndebourne in May (review), Paul Higgins’s revival of Don Giovanni leaves Mariame Clément’s interpretation largely untouched, yet questions about her staging and its ambiguities remain unexplained. Most…
Omar in San Francisco
The black man Omar Ibn Said was forcibly brought from sub-Saharan Africa to South Carolina in 1807. He was sold, becoming an indentured person for life (d. 1863). Omar the…
Handel’s Jephtha at the Royal Opera House
Voices cut through the darkness, chanting in prayer. A candle flickers centre-stage. These are potent symbols of the fundamentalism and fire that drive Handel’s Jephtha and of the battle between…