Year: 2024

Waterperry Opera Festival 2024

Waterperry Opera Festival made the most of the glorious Waterperry Gardens and the elegant Georgian house for a veritable musical feast of summer lushness. This young, dynamic festival has developed into a real summer highlight. The Festival makes excellent use of the different spaces available for performance with the elegant period house that edges the…

If Opera: Lucia di Lammermoor and Die Fledermaus

Whether it is the most lavishly funded opera house or an independent summer festival, opera should be about the singing. Production qualities are important but must be seen as secondary. Sadly, this is not often the case. However, at the fascinating If Opera this short season you can see a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia di…

Les Contes d’Hoffmann, Offenbach Salzburg Festival

***** The delight in concept over content marked the approach of French director Mariame Clément to the difficult to stage Tales of Hoffman. Here she decided to make it a drunken, fallen, film director showing reels of his work with women with whom he had disastrously fallen in love. It is ultimately revealed that they…

Don Giovanni, Salzburg Festival

The employment of artists with alleged links with Putin grabs headlines in the opera world. Thus, the decision of the Salzburg Festival to have Teodor Currentzis in the pit was sure to be controversial. However, if it was there was no indication of this from the audience at his return to conduct Don Giovanni, this…

Rehearsals beginning on Northern Ireland Opera Eugene Onegin

Northern Ireland Opera begins rehearsals today for its fourth main stage production at the Grand Opera House, Belfast. Marking just over one month to go before the premiere of Eugene Onegin on the 14 September, this award-winning national opera company also unveils a stunning new photoshoot set in the woods featuring four of its principal…

A novel take on La bohème

Longborough Festival Opera **** As the summer sun beat down on the rolling grounds of Longborough, this highly enjoyable new production of La bohème opened in a somewhat unconventional manner: a Christmas carol. Instead of the familiar burst of an energetic orchestra, plunging the listener directly into the chilly world of the Parisian bohemians, it…

The gods fizzle out. Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth.

*** The audience for Götterdämmerung from Austrian director Valentin Schwarz’s infamous Ring cycle demonstrated the Bayreuth audience shows no fear in overdoing the booing for the creatives and lavishing too much praise on the singers. It seems something of a sport. This fourth section of the Ring Cycle is undoubtedly an unsatisfying take on the…

A refreshingly intelligent and entertaining Tannhäuser.

Bayreuth Festival. ***** This is proof that imaginative staging and interpretation that retains the spirit and intention of an opera can defy what at first seems a strange and even blasphemous offering of Tannhäuser. Director Tobias Kratzer and his creative team merge actual performance on the Bayreuth stage with live backstage video and pre-recordings, taking…

A Tristan und Isolde death cult, Bayreuth Festival

*** It was supposed to be the highlight of the 2024 season, yet such was the flatness of the production and question marks over the performance of Tristan it was eclipsed by the revival of Tannhäuser which was not even originally scheduled to be staged this year. I am sure I am not alone in…

Proms 2024Prom 6/7: Verdi’s Requiem/Jakub Józef Orliński review

Two Proms in one evening may seem daunting but makes perfect sense if visiting London and only wishing to stay overnight. This is, of course, even more feasible when each is less than two hours duration. Under the baton of Ryan Bancroft, the principal conductor of BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and with the massed…