Year: 2025
A Tosca that delights as glorious entertainment
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…
WNO Successfully Stages the Unstageable Candide
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…
Turandot, Puccini Festival 2025, Torre del Lago, Viareggio
**** 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…
Madama Butterfly at Puccini Festival 2025, Torre del Lago, Viareggio
***** 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…
Waterperry Opera Festival 2025 – Semele, Don Giovanni, A World Turned Upside Down
**** 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…
Mad about children, Verdi’s Macbeth at Salzburg Festival
**** 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…
Hotel Metamorphosis, Salzburg Festival
**** 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…
Pathos and hilarity meet at IF Opera’s new home.
IF Opera – Rigoletto & Orpheus in the Underworld, Church Farm, 2025 IF Opera’s move from the stately lawns of Belcombe Court to the working idyll of Church Farm has brought with it a pleasing blend of rustic charm and artistic ambition – plus the novelty of rescue donkeys grazing contentedly in the neighbouring field…
A shocking Lohengrin saved by glorious singing and fabulous conducting, Bayreuth Festival
*** Some productions jolt you like a live cable. Unfortunately, the thematic current running through Yuval Sharon’s Lohengrin at Bayreuth wasn’t the thrilling charge of Wagner’s drama—it was the sort of shock that a concept can be so overdone, leaving your battery flat. Elza van den Heever , Piotr Beczała Staged in 2018 but revived…
A laughing cow and glorious musicianship, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Bayreuth Festival
***** Wagner is not often associated with levity, but Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg remains his great comic outlier: a sprawling, richly textured celebration of art, tradition, and renewal. That didn’t stop director Matthias Davids from turning it into something resembling an agricultural show —complete with hay bales, Merkel look-alikes, and, in Act III, a giant…