The choice of Il turco in Italia for Glyndebourne in May 2021 might have been made in recognition of its London premiere exactly two centuries earlier in May 1821 at…
Category: Staged Operas
The New National Theatre Tokyo opens its season with Bellini’s La Sonnambula
The NNTT’s 2024/2025 season opened with Vincenzo Bellini’s bel canto masterpiece, La Sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), seen on October 12. A co-production with Madrid’s Teatro Real, Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu…
Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti / A Quiet Place at the Linbury theatre, Covent Garden – Riveting performances for Bernstein’s double bill, but his last opera remains largely unconvincing
Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti (1952) and A Quiet Place (1983) provide a fascinating glimpse of his stylistic development across some thirty years, seen through the lives of a dysfunctional family.…
Beethoven’s Fidelio at Lyric Opera of Chicago
For its second opera in the 2024-25 season Lyric Opera of Chicago has presented Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fidelio. The role of Leonore, who has assumed the male identity Fidelio while…
In times of want: English National Opera’s La bohème
Away from all the bright lights, the mesmerising world of show business, there’s another world: the world of the poor, the needy and the downtrodden. Who ever thought such a…
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Rite of Spring: His Snegurotchka (The Snow Maiden)
Back in the dim and distant past there was climate change too. In the fairy tale that forms the narrative thread of Rimsky-Korsakov’s third and favourite opera, The Snow Maiden,…
Jumbotron at the Opera: Madama Butterfly at LA Opera
All three acts of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly take place in a tiny Japanese cottage on an isolated hill overlooking Nagasaki. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, an American naval officer, has purchased…
Verdi’s Rigoletto at Lyric Opera of Chicago – Another View
The revival of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto now on stage at Lyric Opera of Chicago features several noteworthy debuts and a significant interpretation of the title character. The Duke of Mantua…
The Handmaid’s Tale in San Francisco
Feminist dystopian opera. The Royal Danish Opera’s 2022 production of The Handmaid’s Tale found fertile field in San Francisco! In short Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel made into an opera…
Mixed performances within an austere Eugene Onegin at the Royal Opera House
Tchaikovsky’s tragic masterpiece can be presented with the minimum of means and on the smallest of scales, and this new production from American director Tedd Huffman, making his long-anticipated main…