Pierre Audi’s 2021 Aix Festival included two small pieces that continue the Festival’s operatic exploration of the larger Mediterranean world, meanwhile connecting the Festival’s general director to his Lebanese roots.…
Category: Staged Operas
Le nozze di Figaro at the Aix Festival
Mozart meets hysteria in this new staging of his masterpiece by Dutch metteur en scène Lotte de Beer, to the quick and just baton of conductor Thomas Hengelbrock and his Balthaser…
The Cunning Little Vixen at Opera Holland Park
Our present condition lends us, perhaps more than ever, to think of what has led us here, how things really are now, and where the world will take us next.…
Innocence at the Aix Festival
This was the world premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s new opera that will come soon to Helsinki, Amsterdam, London, New New York and San Francisco, its co-commissioners. Finland born composer Saariaho…
Tristan und Isolde at the Aix Festival
Soprano Nina Stemme, tenor Stuart Skelton, bass Franz-Josef Selig and conductor Simon Rattle create a Tristan of transcendent music in a revelatory staging by Simon Stone. The London Symphony Orchestra…
Falstaff at the Aix Festival
It was inevitable. If stage director Barrie Kosky famously ravaged Wagner’s only comedy at Bayreuth, then he must do the same to Verdi’s only comedy. It happened just now in…
Dramatic darkness and vocal delights as Kasper Holten’s Don Giovanni returns to the Royal Opera House
So, after a Così that was wonderfully serene but somewhat serioso, now a Don Giovanni that impresses vocally but seems to have lost some of its giocoso. Kasper Holten’s production…
Glyndebourne’s Così fan tutte provides welcome reassurance and orderliness
When I last saw Nicholas Hytner’s 2006 Glyndebourne production of Così fan tutte – at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury during the 2017 autumn tour, at the time reportedly the…
Musically, a first-rate Midsummer Night’s Dream from The Grange Festival
Thank goodness for modern technology and sophisticated recording techniques, without which this production of Pears’s and Britten’s cherry-picked edit of Shakespeare’s play might have been scuppered. A month before curtain-up…
Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at the Grange Festival
Stephen Lawless’ production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut opened at the Grange Festival on 26 June 2021, the third of this year’s three opera productions all originally planned for 2020. Elin Pritchard was…