‘A rubbishy old play.’ Michael Burden, editor of the Eulenberg edition of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen (the first to include the complete spoken text and music), explains that Restoration and…
Category: Staged Operas
DMMO’s dwb: Tackling Social Injustice
“Every time you leave, I’ll try to let go a little more. But every time, I’ll be waiting to hear your key in our front door.” – The Mother in…
Semele at Glyndebourne
“No Oratorio, but a baudy [sic] opera.” Such was the assessment of Handel’s Semele offered by Charles Jennens, the librettist of Handel’s Messiah. He was probably echoing the somewhat cold…
Massenet’s Le roi de Lahore at Dorset Opera
Despite the revival of interest in Massenet’s operas, Le roi de Lahore does not seem to have been staged in the UK since 1879. It is that still relatively unfashionable…
Astonishing Castle Among Iowa’s Cornfields
Miraculous. That pretty much encapsulates my reaction to the staggering accomplishment of Des Moines Metro Opera’s festival production of Bartok’s masterpiece, Bluebeard’s Castle. This taut, barely sixty-minute performance was brimming…
Des Moines’ Juicy Oranges Have Zesty Ap-peel
If you enjoy an occasional unapologetic, boisterous paean to shamelessly infectious comic absurdity, well, please plunk your silly ass down, right next to mine. In the case of Sergei Prokofiev…
The Pilgrim’s Progress at the Three Choirs Festival
‘As regards the Cathedral – it is, to my mind essentially a stage piece & I said I wd not allow it in a hall or church till it was…
Tristan und Isolde at the Bavarian State Opera
Krzysztof Warlikowski’s Tristan, first seen two years ago, marking an end to Nikolaus Bachler’s intendancy, is on first sight at least, a puzzling affair. There are ideas, certainly, though quite…
A double bill of Purcell and Schoenberg in Munich
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…
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…