William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is all about its melancholic title character. Yet the Danish Prince’s eloquence seduces most of us to overlook the play’s melodramatic plot: a murdered king, usurping brother,…
Category: Staged Operas
London Handel Festival Double Bill: Tales of Apollo and Hercules
Quotations about – not from – myth festoon both stage (pre-performance) and the accompanying freesheet: ‘The lover of myth is in a sense a philosopher; for myth is composed of…
La forza del destino in Lyon
Each early spring the Opéra national de Lyon imagines three operas within a vague thematic framework to comprise its Winter Festival. This year the theme is “Se saisir de l’avenir”…
L’Avenir nous le dira and 7 Minutes in Lyon
The first a premiere, the second of recent vintage. Both constructed on count downs (the first, one hour, the second, two hours) — thus the Opéra de Lyon’s Winter Festival…
A Tale of Two Fidelios
At the Metropolitan Opera, performances of the same opera with the same singers just a few days apart often sound very different. During the recent run of Fidelio, for example,…
Musical liveliness transcends some obscurities in the Royal Academy’s hospital-based Magic Flute
Jamie Manton’s production of The Magic Flute for the Royal Academy of Music takes its cue from Tamino’s predicament at the opera’s opening – wounded and in mortal danger. Accordingly,…
Off with her head!: Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda at Hamburg State Opera
Had it not been for King Henry VIII, England would have remained a Catholic country and the course of English, and later British, history would have been very different. Had…
On Haydn’s desert island at the Paris Opera
L’isola disabitata (The Uninhabited Island) is a comparatively late opera by Haydn, or rather an azione teatrale, which calls for only four soloists and an intimate setting. Indeed, it may…
An unconventional, satirical take on Weber’s Der Freischütz for Opera Ballet Vlaanderen at Antwerp
Weber’s Der Freischütz is well-known – and variously admired or deplored – as one of the seminal works of German musical Romanticism. Despite its fame and influence, it isn’t now…
A Captivating new production of Pelléas et Mélisande at Opéra Bastille
Premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris in 1902 and closely based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s play, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande is renowned for its collision between “its severest realism and the…