Purcell and Schoenberg: my kind of double bill. Puritan ‘authenticity’, or whatever it is calling itself at the moment, is so all-pervasive when it comes to the seventeenth century that…
Category: Staged Operas
Itch: a new opera by Jonathan Dove at Opera Holland Park
Simon Mayo’s book Itch was written, originally, for his science-loving son; two more books and a TV series later, Itch is now an opera by Jonathan Dove with a libretto by Alasdair Middleton based…
Wozzeck at the Aix Festival
Finally! Cancelled in 2003 by a strike, postponed in 2020 by Covid, Alban Berg’s expressionist masterpiece Wozzeck has just been given 5 performances at Aix’s Grand Théâtre de Provence —…
The bohemians go to the movies at Opera Holland Park
Giacomo Puccini’s operatic career, from the early 1890s to his death in 1924, roughly coincided with the emergence and early development of cinema and sound recording. However, unlike many of…
Semele in Munich
I was sceptical, I admit, for the first two acts of Claus Guth’s new production of Semele, but it came together and offered an anthropological and psychoanalytical interpretation of Handel’s…
Così fan tutte in Munich
It is refreshing to find a Così fan tutte that takes the very greatest of Mozart and Da Ponte’s three masterpieces (for the most part) seriously. The amount of nonsense…
Cosi fan tutte at the Aix Festival
The Aix Festival was founded 75 summers ago as an altar to the operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (in French it is pronounced Mose-art). This year Cosi is up again…
Le Prophète and Picture a Day Like This at the Aix Festival
Giacomo Meyerbeer was born near Berlin as Jacob Beer. Early in his professional life he joined his maternal grandfather’s given name, Meyer, to his father’s family name, taking on the…
An enlarged, multi-layered Carmen by Oper im Steinbruch intrigues and frustrates
Oper im Steinbruch (Opera in the Quarry) presents an annual spectacular outdoor opera production in the historic St. Margarethen quarry near Eisenstadt in Austria. In 2019, the opera was Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and after a…
Ballets Russes at the Aix Festival
Not to be confused with Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes or Wassily de Basil’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, it was Igor Stravinsky’s trilogy of ballet scores created for Paris based,…