‘Love, viewed from the dark side’: Christof Loy’s production of Strauss’s Elektra at the Royal Opera House

Skimming through some of the critical literature on the myth of Electra – who, following the murder of her father, the Mycenaean King Agamemnon, at the hands of her mother…

A children-friendly Hansel and Gretel at Covent Garden

Hunger and gluttony; poverty and glamour; homelessness and tinselly angels; the reality of rags and the sparkle of magic.  The stark juxtapositions evident on the Strand, during my walk from…

Götterdämmerung at Opera Australia 

In one small but powerful and sobering moment, with micro-second flashbacks of digital imagery taking the audience back to where it all began seven days previously, it rather felt like…

Siegfried at Opera Australia

Arriving for the penultimate installment of Wagner’s Ring can make it feel like it’s almost over but, welcomingly, there are hours ahead to get to know Siegfried, Wagner’s heroic titular…

Die Walküre at Opera Australia

For all Chinese-born, New York-based director Chen Shi-Zheng’s attempts to posit Wagner’s 4-part Der Ring des Nibelungen as “modern science fiction” in a multiverse setting, all the archetypal elements Wagner wrote into…

Das Rheingold at Opera Australia

Having been postponed in both 2020 and 2021 due to the global pandemic, Opera Australia’s much-publicized new “digital” Ring Cycle finally opened Friday evening. And it couldn’t have been more…

Simon Boccanegra at the New National Theatre Tokyo

To some people, Simon Boccanegra (1857, rev. 1881) is one of Verdi’s finest musical masterpieces, yet both admirers and detractors regard it as based on one of his most problematic…

A dystopian Ariodante at the Royal Academy of Music

‘The Rules’ define a male-centric world as oppressive and restrictive as Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.  Kings rule by divine right.  Gender is binary.  The value of a woman is her purity.…

Welsh National Opera: Ainadamar at the Mayflower, Southampton

Spain is ‘a country of death, a country open to death’ once declared the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca.  It’s an assertion that provides a foretaste of Ainadamar, Osvaldo…

Médée at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s lyric tragedy Médée premiered in 1694 with its dedicatee, Louis XIV, in attendance. The five-act libretto adapted by Thomas Corneille from Euripides’ play retells one of the most…