English National Opera seem to be making a summer habit of popping up with Puccini in London’s palace-parks. After 2020’s hill-top drive-in La bohème at Alexandra Palace, this year the…
Category: Staged Operas
Opera on Location bring Debussy’s The prodigal son home to Sheffield
Located in one of Sheffield’s oldest industrial districts, Kelham Island Museum stands on a man-made island, the result of 12th-century engineering when a goit, or mill race, was constructed diverting…
Rossini Opera Festival, Pesaro 2021
Moïse et Pharaon, ou Le passage de la mer rouge is Rossini’s adaptation of his Neapolitan Mosè in Egitto for the Paris Opéra. This revision may be the epitome of…
British Youth Opera: a superb cast shine in Rossini’s L’occasione fa il ladro
Rossini’s libretti often require one to leave logic at the theatre entrance and embrace the absurd – stock buffa characters, stolen and switched identities, arranged marriages, double nuptials, an inevitable…
Cries in the High Desert
Beginning in 1957, the venerable Santa Fe Opera festival embarked on an ambitious journey that included presenting world premieres, in which series this summer’s The Lord of Cries is the…
Figaro la, Figaro qua in Santa Fe
Like the barber in another famous piece, Santa Fe Opera’s The Marriage of Figaro (Le nozze di Figaro) is frequently all over the place. There may be a number of…
Santa Fe Opera Fields a Dream Team
If ever there was a nigh perfect match of an opera with idyllic outdoor surroundings, Santa Fe Opera’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is surely the one. The opening thirty minutes…
Aida at the Macerata Opera Festival
The Macerata Opera Festival celebrates its centenary season this year with the same opera that opened the first season of the festival in 1921: Verdi’s Aida. Summer opera in Macerata…
Cheery charm in Opera Holland Park’s The Pirates of Penzance
Oh, is there not one maiden breastWhich does not feel the moral beautyOf making worldly interestSubordinate to sense of duty? ‘The Slave of Duty’ is the subtitle of Gilbert and…
Restrained passions in West Green Opera’s Eugene Onegin
‘Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests’.…