Calixto Bieito’s grimly visualised Carmen has now reached its third revival. First presented by ENO at the Coliseum in 2012 (and much travelled around Europe since its launch in Barcelona…
Category: Staged Operas
Carmen and Le Trouvère in Paris
Among the most performed titles in the repertory, it was the 30th performance of Verdi’s Il trovatore in this 2016 production by Barcelona’s chic theater collective La Fura dels Baus,…
Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera House
‘R. slept well and has decided to have a massage only once a day,’ writes Cosima Wagner in one of her last diary entries, from Venice, only twenty days before…
Peter Grimes in Paris
That the Four Sea Interludes and the Passacaglia from Peter Grimes have become orchestral showpieces attests to the opera’s musical might, manifest just now at the Palais Garnier by British…
Tristan et Isolde in Paris
A few weeks ago it was one act per night in Los Angeles, in Paris just now it is all three acts at once, as it had been back in…
McVicar’s The Magic Flute returns to the Royal Opera House
David McVicar’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute is well on its way to its 20th anniversary (the production debuted in 2003). The current revival (seen 19 December 2022) is…
Lohengrin at Bayerische Staatsoper
Pity the modern European stage director confronted with Lohengrin. The music is famously seductive, but the plot is abhorrent. What is one to make of a saint who arrives on…
It’s a Wonderful Life at English National Opera
For want of a mislaid £8000, both George Bailey’s company and his own reputation are on the brink of ruin, and he himself stands on a literal precipice, ready to…
The Rake’s Progress at the Royal Academy of Music
Blessed by varied approaches to its staging and performance, The Rake’s Progress seems to remain eternally itself (whatever that might mean, as a sometime Prince of Wales might have put…
Orpheus in the Underworld at the Royal College of Music
Identifying the influences which inform her new production of Jacques Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld at the Royal College of Music, director Louise Bakker cites ‘everything from Brideshead, Blackadder and…