Year: 2024
An inventive new L’Incoronazione di Poppea
**** Grange Festival, Hampshire It would seem the contemporary version of achieving the feeling of absolute authority, power over everyone including sexual favours, and endless confidence, is an endless supply of cocaine. For director Walter Sutcliffe, there doesn’t seem to be a version for women – they still seem to need to achieve their status…
A fun-filled Daughter of the Regiment, Donizetti
Grange Park Opera. **** The Daughter of the Regiment is an operatic vehicle for some fine singing and musicianship, and fun. Anything that tries to do any more with it are just missing the point. Fortunately, John Doyle and Nikki Woollaston, co-directors of Grange Park Opera’s staging of Donizetti’s 1840 piece of fun and frolics…
Contemporary sensibilities have to be suspended for Platée, Jean-Philippe Rameau, Garsington Opera
*** Garsington’s updating and reworking of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s comedy dance opera Platée solves the Platée problem; it definitely needs something to lift it from far too cruel and nasty a tale for contemporary audiences. The story revolves around an ugly and deluded swamp nymph, Platée, tricked into thinking the philandering god Jupiter has fallen for…
Mid Wales Opera thrown lifeline
Mid Wales Opera which had been threatened with closure as a result of Arts Council Wales (ACW) cuts has been thrown a vital lifeline with a cash injection of £75,906 from Powys County Council’s grant funding programme, aimed at supporting and transforming the creative industries within the region. It is now asking its many supporters and…
Peace and Passion, Welsh National Opera, Wales Millennium Centre
★★★ It could not have been more apt for this concert that Mozart was struggling to make ends meet and even hold onto life when composing the Requiem. Our sources tell us he was notorious for a lifestyle of expenditure that income could never keep up with. The work had to be finished by others…
Macbeth, Mid Wales Opera
**** It would be wrong to make what may be the last review of a full-scale work by Mid Wales Opera about the preposterous axing of the company’s funding by the increasingly out of touch Arts Council of Wales. However, the energy on the stage seemed as marked outside of the auditorium at the Riverfront,…
Death in Venice, Britten, Welsh National Opera at Wales Millennium Centre
**** The first instalment in this year’s WNO Spring season was a revisitation of a classic, and so it feels very balanced that we are now invited to explore the dark (and, in places, insalubrious) world of a more esoteric work, one that was produced well after the heyday of classical opera and that is…
Opera Favourites, Welsh National Opera
** While Welsh National Opera’s spring concert imaginatively called Opera Favourites did what it said on the tin, it was also partly a musical preview of some scheduled shows. There was, for example, a fair chunk of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, February 2025, and a rousing chorus and orchestral section from Britten’s Peter Grimes,…
Opera Holland Park 2024 season
Opera Holland Park’s 2024 Season opens to press and public on 28 May with a revival of StephenBarlow’s sharp and seductive 2008 production of Tosca, new productions of The Barber of Seville(sponsored by Viking) and Acis and Galatea, three semi-staged performances of Puccini’s earlyromance, Edgar, a sensational double bill contrasting John Wilkie’s stylish 2019 staging…
Così Fan Tutte, Welsh National Opera
Wales Millennium Centre *** There are some works which are harder to look at under a modern lens than others, and Così Fan Tutte is certainly one of that number. To bring to a stage, in 2024, a work that is literally titled ‘they’re all the same’ is inevitably to contend with its glaring sexism,…