The Flying Dutchman, WNO
20th April 2026
Decline of WNO reflected by meagre new season
15th April 2026
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…
Cash-strapped Welsh National Opera has announced its 80th anniversary season with just one full opera, a double bill, a chamber-scale work, a children’s show and family concert, and a Welsh language joint theatre venture. The announcement comes as the company looks for a new musical director to replace Tomáš Hanus. The new season understandably…
n the luminous stone sanctuary of 11th-century Brecon Cathedral, listening to one of opera’s earliest masterpieces, it was hard not to reflect on how unforgiving the 21st century has been to the art form. Yet Mid Wales Opera’s OpenStages production of Dido and Aeneas offered something increasingly rare in our cultural life: not merely reassurance,…
Tosca, Welsh National Opera Tosca with a reduced orchestra and bought in 2018 production from Opera North may not sound like the height of excitement for Welsh National Opera’s autumn season. Yet, the Saturday afternoon performance at Wales Millennium Centre was a glorious entertainment that had the usually more restrained opera audiences literally cheering at…
Wales Millennium Centre Leonard Bernstein’s Candide premiered on Broadway in 1956 where its short-run was met with puzzlement and poor reviews. While Candide has found more favourable reactions in recent decades, it remains a problematic work. What exactly is it? An opera? A musical? Welsh National Opera opts to call it an operetta – which…
**** The staging of Turandot at the 2025 Puccini Festival in Torre del Lago offered a traditional, large-scale interpretation of the composer’s last unfinished work, making the most of its spectacular lakeside setting. Few opera houses can match the visual impact of this open-air amphitheater on the shores of Lake Massaciuccoli, with Puccini’s villa, and…
***** The 2025 staging of Madama Butterfly at the Puccini Festival at Torre del Largo offered a strikingly modern reading of Puccini’s tragedy, recast as a meditation on male dominance and the precarious position of women within patriarchal structures. The Neapolitan soprano Valeria Sepe, drafted in to replace Maria Agresta, proved a revelation. Her Butterfly…
**** Handel’s Semele was an excellent choice for the always surpring Waterperry Opera Festival. The exquisite Waterperry Garden’s offered Handel’s drama an environment in which music, myth, and landscape coalesced to stirring effect. The open air lent freshness to the score, while the transition from daylight to dusk mirrored the opera’s descent from playful seduction…
**** In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the tyrant reflects on his wife’s death with the immortal words: “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It is tempting to dismiss Verdi’s Macbeth as staged by Krzysztof Warlikowski at the Salzburg Festival, with Shakespeare’s famous line about “sound and fury, signifying nothing”. It was a powerful evening of theatre yet there…
**** We were advised Cecilia Bartoli was suffering from a cold but would perform. Phew! Cold aside, the soprano gave an exquisite performance in Barrie Kosky’s three-hour pasticcio, Hotel Metamorphosis. Her performance was central to the success of this show that braids Vivaldi’s arias and music with famous selections from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The scenes enabled…
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