One might say of Daniel Slater’s production of Handel’s Tamerlano at The Grange Festival that the staging offers nothing about which to complain and that the singing gives much to…
Category: Staged Operas
Don Giovanni at San Francisco Opera
The crowning jewel of Mozart’s operas has arrived at the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera now completing, finally, the Covid thwarted rollout of an integrated Mozart/DaPonte trilogy. The…
A double bill of Monteverdi and Weill at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
The London Conservatoires frequently serve up some of the most interesting operatic fare in the capital: unusual programmes, often in eclectic pairings, presented in inventive stagings – and, of course,…
Garsington Opera: Così fan tutte
Dismissed by Beethoven and Wagner, it has taken nearly two centuries for Così fan tutte to emerge from society’s censor and for Mozart’s genius for expressing human nature through sublime…
Monteverdi’s Orfeo at Garsington Opera
What is most striking about John Caird’s new production of Monteverdi’s Orfeo at Garsington Opera is the extent to which it reminds us that the humanist theories informing the aesthetic…
Hamlet at the Met
Today, with post-romanticism and minimalism in decline, most new operas fall into one of two categories. They are either “popularist” or “modernist.” Populist operas are crossover works. Building on Gershwin’s…
Missed chances and haunting memories: Eugene Onegin at Opera Holland Park
If the first night of Julia Burbach’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin at Opera Holland Park marked the start of London’s summer opera season, it certainly didn’t mark the start…
A gripping Siegfried at Longborough Festival Opera
There’s something wholly satisfying when an opera is allowed to breathe its own magic without overworked directorial interference. This new production of Siegfried – originally planned for 2021 – forms…
Samson et Dalila at the Royal Opera House
To describe Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila as ‘old-fashioned’ doesn’t seem controversial. The French composer’s score harks back to the past with its allusions to Handelian fugue and Bachian chorale, betraying…
Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers at Glyndebourne
It’s not often that a Glyndebourne production offers its audience an interactive experience. But, that’s what seemed to be happening towards the close of the final Act of the second…