*** In Dorset Opera’s Samson et Dalila the voices are strong, the chorus exemplary, and Jeremy Carnall’s orchestra plays with real conviction. Rufus Martin gives us a single set, a heavily damaged temple, and it stays put all evening. At first I took it for the wrecked place of worship of the conquered Jews, which…
★★★★ There are two things that keep me coming back to Dorset Opera, and both were in ample supply here. One is a chorus of a size that lets it do what a chorus is actually supposed to do, and the other is musicianship of a standard that would embarrass companies with ten times the…
★★★ Mike Smith I cannot remember the last time a Garsington audience laughed this hard for this long. People around me were in tears, a man two seats away applauded a smashed dinner plate, and by the time forty of them had been demolished in the great Act One row I was beginning to feel…
For several seconds after the last chord had faded, nobody moved. No cough, no rustle, no premature clap, just a whole auditorium held, as if exhaling would break something. Only when the spell finally cracked did it give way to an ovation that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than the usual reflex of applause….
Grange Park warned us it would be hot. So hot that Das Rheingold, normally played in one unbroken run, would get a fifteen‑minute cooling‑off break. As it turned out, the heat was not a problem. The only real trouble was seemingly technical. Charlie Edwards’s concept for Grange Park Opera’s new Ring Cycle, judging from the…
Karolina Sofulak’s new production of Macbeth is one of those evenings that leaves you admiring the thinking behind it more than the theatrical experience itself. There is no shortage of ideas. Designer Kimie Nakano’s landscape of twisted steel, dominated by what resembles the skeletal remains of a collapsed electricity pylon, immediately evokes a kingdom poisoned…
★★★★★ Il ritorno d’Ulisse is probably the hardest of Monteverdi’s surviving works to bring off on a contemporary stage. First heard during Venice’s 1639–40 carnival season, Ulisse is now called part of a trilogy of Monteverdi works, although that is only a modern term for what has survived. Ulisse, and Orfeo which has already been…
**** Verdi’s Don Carlo remains one of opera’s most compelling examinations of power, politics and human frailty. Packed with forbidden love, friendship, betrayal, religious fanaticism and political manoeuvring, it is also one of the composer’s most demanding works, requiring six principal singers capable of sustaining a drama that unfolds over four acts of intense musical…
Orlando, Longborough Festival Opera Handel’s Orlando is not the easiest sell. The plot is gloriously convoluted, the action often stops dead while somebody sings about their feelings for ten minutes, and it sits somewhere between pastoral romance, psychological drama and outright fantasy. Yet Longborough Festival Opera’s new production makes a remarkably strong case for the…
How do you adapt The Flying Dutchman for 2026? Wagner’s shortest opera is not a frequent flyer to contemporary stages, perhaps, for understandable reasons; it is deeply steeped in the Romantic iconography and storytelling, with a pervasive undertone of Christian moralising that doesn’t help things at all, and thus may sound alien to a contemporary…
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