Der Ring des Nibelungen is the centre piece of this year’s Longborough Festival – all four instalments of Wagner’s epic staged over three successive weeks. That the performances take place…
Category: Staged Operas
Revolutions: A magical evening of six new operas by young composers at the Royal College of Music
Often a reviewer’s evening spent at the opera has little to do with the future of the art – arguably, we might sometimes be thinking it is the opposite. The…
Caesar in Saint Louis: Prima La Musica
A musically resplendent presentation of Georg Frideric Handel’s Julius Caesar covered Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in glory. Guilio Cesare in Egitto is number one on Handel’s operatic hit parade…
Saint Louis: Star Gazing with Galileo
You don’t need a telescope to spot the stars in Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ winning and sumptuous production of Philip Glass and Mary Zimmerman’s Galileo Galilei. They are all…
Così fan tutte at the Royal Opera House
Jan Philipp Gloger’s rendition of Così fan tutte places Daniel Heartz’s assessment of the work as an ‘opera about an opera’ centre stage. It is a so-called meta-reading. Thus, for…
L’Orfeo at Cremona’s Monteverdi Festival
The stage director informed us that this Orfeo was effected through the lens of quantum physics and the Schrödinger paradox. Be that as it may, it was a splendid L’Orfeo…
Getting Beneath the Surface: Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte in Princeton
On its face, no opera seems trashier than Così fan tutte. Two best bros bet on the fidelity of their young fiancées, disguise themselves as exotic strangers, and try to…
Garsington’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is long on mystery & short on magic
Netia Jones’s new staging of Britten and Pears’s take on Shakespeare’s play creates plenty of mystery, though not necessarily the kind that’s easy to appreciate. Her single monochrome set intrigues…
Welsh National Opera’s Outstanding Il trittico
Within the last year or so Welsh National Opera has produced some remarkable productions including two unforgettable stagings of Candide and Death in Venice. Now, Puccini’s Il trittico has begun…
Intellectually serious but searing take on Monteverdi’s masterpiece
Having presented Handel’s Agrippina in 2018 – wittily reinterpreting Nero’s accession to power as the Grange Festival’s assumption of the role of company in residence at the Grange, Northington, after the…