Month: August 2023
Intimate and contrasting staging, Double Bill, Waterperry Opera
Waterperry Opera Festival’ s new double bill of Acis and Galatea billed with Dido and Aeneas shows how effective the intimate staging in the Amphitheater is with a small cast taking different roles in the two operas. The Dido and Aeneas is played mainly by fire light and takes a particularly dark interpretation of the…
Never ending story, Tristan und Isolde, Bayreuth Festival
Now in its second season at this Wagnerian wonderland, director Roland Schwab’s Tristan und Isolde has again proven to be a favourite of the Bayreuth audience and this year – and that is without the context of contrasting with a seemingly deeply unpopular production of Der Ring des Nibelungen. There is always the risk with…
A tale of Nordic revenge, Die fliegende Hollander, Bayreuth Festival
A Flying Dutchman without any ship let alone any sea? A retelling of Wagner’s tale as a son’s revenge on a community that had driven his mother to suicide? Another mother’s killing of a madman who has taken control of the mind of her own rather mad daughter? Well, a director can take his Der…
Theatrical genius, Tannhauser, Bayreuth Festival
How can it be that your preconceptions of a production based on just seeing some performance photography can get it all so, so wrong? Theoretically, this production of Tannhauser for Wagner’s Festspielhaus should have been just what I loathe in contemporary stagings: merging actual performance with live video and pre-recordings, waving wokism in your face,…
A doubly surreal Parsifal, Bayreuth Festival
This new Parsifal for Bayreuth was really two productions: one for the small number of us with Augmented Reality glasses and the second for the vast majority of the audience without. While the embracing of whatever technology enhanced his own work was a hallmark of Richard Wagner, I doubt if he would have enjoyed this…
Heavenly Dialogues des Carmelites, BBC Proms, Royal Albert Hall
**** There were two surprises for me at the beginning of Glyndebourne Festival Opera’s production of Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmelites performed as a semi-staged concert as part of BBC Proms. The first was how many people had come to the still quite rarely performed opera. The second was the acoustics when Robin Ticciati conducting the…